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Hello BC readers, it’s been a while. I’ve been off working on comics (The Freeze Vol 1 trade from Image Comics/Top Cow is in stores now…) but after
Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies | Tagged: animation, entertainment, film, halo, machinima, Rooster Teeth, RWBY
LIVE! From Rooster Teeth's RWBY Panel at NYCC
Adi Tantimedh writes for Bleeding Cool:
RWBY is indie animation studio Rooster Teeth's other hugely successful CGI series after the long-established Machinima take-off of the Halo games Red Vs. Blue. In contrast to the dude-bro humour of bored goofball armoured supersoldiers, RWBY is an anime-inspired webseries set in an alternate world where a superpowered teenage warriors are trained at an elite school to battle threats to their world. The series, now in its second season, is serialized on Rooster Teeth's website, YouTube and Crunchyroll, and has been licensed for broadcast in Japan, a rare instance of an anime-inspired American animation series being picked up for Japan, with the DVD and Blu-Ray of Volume Two due out on November 17th.
Volume Two opening titles:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/rpAfCxXctlY[/youtube]
Series creators – director and co-writer Monty Oum, co-writer Kerry Shawcross and community manager and voice actress Barbara Dunkelman had a panel entirely devoted to RWBY and hundreds of adoring fans filled the auditorium to hear them speak and watch an advance preview of the episode 10 and the first half of episode 11, the latter won't be online for two weeks. The show was as visually witty and inventive as ever, especially in its ambitious and wushu-inspired fight scenes reminiscent of Hong Kong martial arts movies of the 90s choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping. Of course, they stopped the video at a crucial plot point, which sent the audience into screams and applause.
"WHY DO YOU TORTURE US SO?" mock-screamed a fan.
The other surprise was the announcement of a line of 12-inch RWBY dolls, all fully posable with hand-stitched costumes, premium collectors items with detailed weapons, props and alternate costumes, the Ruby figure costing $168 and the Blake, Yang and Weiss dolls priced at $150, out in November alongside the release of the DVD and Blu-Ray of Volume 2.
They then fielded questions from a long of fans, and anyone who got to ask one getting a free plushie doll of one of the four heroines from the series. Questions ranged from Canadian fans asking them to go to cons in Canada, ideas for spinoff series, slash fiction, whether they'll ever have openly queer characters and relationships and the notion of a crossover with Red Vs. Blue.
The panel capped off the hour with the announcement that the final of Volume 2 would be October 30th and it would be shown live in theatres with a livestream.
Fans came from all over the world to attend the panel and then meet the creators at the Rooster Teeth booth. It's a testament to the show's witty, lovable heroines that the series has a huge female fan following since they're empowered and not sexualized the way superhero comics or anime have a tendency to do with heroines. That the series is a global success entirely through the internet and social media, with hundreds of pages of fan art and deviantart pages, RWBY is a series that's as much curated by fans as by its creators, and designed to be that way.
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