Author: Lenlo

I’ve tried my best to be positive about RWBY: Ice Queendom up through now. As a character study on Weiss, I still believe it’s not bad! But this week… This was not a good week, for a lot of reasons. Let’s dive in and talk about them.

Starting off, dear god did this episode look bad. I’m not talking about just bad or janky animation, that’s been present since the beginning. Though that does of course exist as well. No, rather what I want to draw attention to is just the half-assed, absurdly lazy direction and storyboarding of the episode. Stuff like Yang just standing in the center of the screen while the camera slowly pans upwards. Or the incredibly static nature of a train and its occupants sliding across the screen. Stuff like that. They even managed to make a train crash boring and unimpactful! And you can find this basically everywhere. From the small Ruby and Weiss fight to Yang’s motorcycle to Smol!Weiss and Pyrrha shooting out of the train cars. It all feels like the most basic, straight forward, lazy way the scenes could have been presented.

Continue reading “RWBY: Ice Queendom – 9 [My Dream, Your Dream]” →

Welcome everyone, to another episode of RWBY: Ice Queendom! Much to my surprise, Queendom continues its trend of actually being kinda good. Not visually, that’s still an absolute dumpster fire. But narratively? I’m… I’m kind of invested. And every time I write that I have to stare at it in shock. Why? Let’s dive in and talk about it.

First up, let’s just completely skip animation. We both know it’s not good at this point. Queendom didn’t even give us a fight with the giant robot statue Nicholas this week, that’s how disappointing it was. So instead lets skip right to the story where Queendom totally surprised me. Remember last week when I said this was the final run and we were going to slowly work our way to Weiss? Well forget that. Because instead we just speed ran our way back to the Grimm, failed, and then got punted to an even lower nadir. A nadir so low in fact that I am actually entertaining the possibility that someone might actually die. It’s a low chance, don’t get me wrong. But the OG RWBY did it, and we’ve already broken from canon, so why can’t Queendom? Suffice to say, I’d be really impressed if it did.

Continue reading “RWBY: Ice Queendom – 8 [Where You Belong]” →

Welcome back everyone, to another episode of RWBY: Ice Queendom! This week is actually a good step up from the last, in basically every respect. It’s not perfect of course. But there’s a lot I liked about it, so lets jump right in and talk about it.

Starting off, the animation. Let’s not beat around the bush, Queendom has been suffering here for a while and this week isn’t any different. The CGI continues to stick out like a sore thumb and there are some scenes I can count the frames on one hand in. To say Queendom looks janky at times would be a compliment. But, and this is a big but, this week actually had some fun stuff as well. From small parts of the train fight, stuff like Jaune’s landing and Yang’s short combination, to all the tiny Weiss’s running around. It’s the most interesting and engaging animation that we’ve had since the opening 3 episodes dropped. Does that make it incredible? No, not really. But a drowning man at sea doesn’t complain when he finds a half-full water bottle floating by.

Continue reading “RWBY Ice Queendom – 7 [Dreams Come Rued]” →