So, we begin with the Red Trailer. Beautiful lute music starts up, and after a black screen with "Rooster Teeth presents", we see a cloudless deep blue sky, somehow snowing quite heavily. The brilliant white moon takes up most of the screen, and "a new series by Monty Oum" is displayed across it. A rose petal drifts across the letters, dissolving them, and we fade to black.

The next shot is a lone youth dressed in a corset, stockings, and skirt, all black, and cloaked in a brilliant red hood and cape that billows in the wind, being the source of the floating rose petals. She stands in what at first seems to be a blank, misty void, but as we fade out and vocals begin to accompany our lute, we see that she is standing on the edge of a snow-covered cliff, facing a gravestone. The next scene shows her turning and walking away from it, so that the audience can see the words on its face: “Summer Rose”, with the quote, “Thus Kindly I Scatter”, these beneath an engraved rose blossom.

The red hooded youth walks through a forest of barren trees, and black shadows pass through the trees around her. Finally, the girl steps out onto an immense snow-covered clearing, facing a large group of inky black wolves with bloodred eyes and teeth. They seem to consider her for a moment, dancing back and forth, before three attack. Unconcerned, the girl merely vanishes into a cloud of rose petals an instant before they can land their hits, leaving them eating snow and confused. But she’s not gone—no, we see her from below, and it turns out she’s leapt high into the air, silhouetted in slow motion against the moon. The vocals come to a halt, a piercing whistle in the background. The girl’s innocent face, framed in dark red hair, is visible, her hood gone.

And then she whips out an enormous gun and blows a chunk of one of the wolves’ heads off.

The swerve in the prose I just used versus the bluntness of my last sentence is not an exaggeration. That is literally what happens onscreen, in just as much of a swerve as it sounds like. As the first wolf dies with 50% less cranium than before, Spanish guitar music starts up. What happens next is best described as “the most beautiful slaughter”, because transcribing the exact details of long fight scenes is not something I’ll actually have to do until later.

Suffice it to say that not one, not ten, not a hundred of these ghastly wolves offers this girl even the slightest difficulty as she rends them apart. After blowing out a few torsos, her already huge gun unfolds into an impossibly huge and ultra badass scythe blade. Which she then uses in tandem with the rifle function to utterly decimate her opponents, leaping and twirling with inhuman speed and reacting to every movement against her with cool, calm, practiced ease. Limbs, heads, and all manner of body parts inbetween go flying. Each wolf she kills bleeds more floating rose petals until they dissolve into nothing. At one point she bisects a wolf in the middle of its attack without even looking at it, and shortly after she bisects another wolf with the recoil from the shot she killed a second one with. She says not one word throughout, but her expression screams that she is entirely unconcerned.

Late into the fight, she realizes that her head-on approach has drawn the entire horde to her, adding an extra fifty wolves rough to her two-dozen body count. Does she seem worried? Of course not. Not a damn thing changes.

Well, one thing changes. She changes her ammo, discarding one clip for a new one bearing a cross marking on it. The muzzle flash, previously white, turns black as she launches herself across the battlefield at immense speed, firing to turn herself into a spinning whirlwind of death. Things proceed in much the same way across the next few seconds: limbs flying, wolves dying, me crying, teen girl barely trying. They never stood a chance—she is a god to them and virtually all of them die before they know what’s hit them.

Her last kill scored, the girl twirls her scythe and poses, silhouetted against the moon, as her spent shells rain down into the snow around her. There is not a scratch on her.

The scene oversaturates to red and black, and we see the following credits:

ROOSTERTEETH.COM presents

“RWBY”

LINDSAY TUGGEY KARA EBERLE ARRYN ZECH BARBARA DUNKELMAN

animation MONTY OUM and SHANE NEWVILLE

character design MONTY OUM JEFF CHANG music by JEFF WILLIAMS

produced by MATT HULLUM BURNIE BURNS KATHLEEN ZEULCH

written by MONTY OUM MILES LUNA KERRY SHAWCROSS

directed by MONTY OUM

and as they fade out, her saturated red silhouette spins in to become one of four. Four shadowed women lay across out screen, and the one we’ve now met re-colors as a digital artpiece of her. “Coming 2013” is displayed across the bottom. The Rooster Teeth logo promoting their site is the last thing we see.

Well, guess we should go over the information we just absorbed, huh?

First, this is our protagonist of the upcoming series. Her name is Ruby Rose. Two other features to notice are the gravestone bearing what is obviously her mother’s name on the cliffside, and the wolves. Both are important to the story, but only the latter is a stolen Skyrim werewolf re-colored. Woops.

But we can forgive a little theft in the name of art, right? (/s) Because as Monty said, this first trailer was meant more as a weapons display than anything for character’s sake. Fair enough, if I could animate like that I’d show it off, too.

(This is a roundabout way of saying that the character we see of Ruby later is going to be very, very jarring when looking back on this cool, collected, stoic girl).

Secondly, notice the music. That was Red Like Roses (Part I), instrumentals by Jeff Williams and vocals by daughter Casey Lee Williams, who was only 13 at the time. It was a spectacular piece, but special attention goes to the lyrics, of which there are only four, and they describe the four colors and characters who will be leading our cast:

“Red like roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest,

White is cold and always yearning, burdened by a royal test,

Black the beast descends from shadows,

Yellow beauty burns gold.”

The lyric for the red of roses plays as we first see our main character. The lyric for the cold white plays as she travels through the snow-covered forest. The lyric for black the beast plays as we meet the wolves made of living darkness, and the final lyric for yellow gold plays as she looks down from mid-air, the moon with its yellow halo as her backdrop.

The music was very clearly designed to compliment the scene and vice versa. The lyrics are meant to tell the story of what’s happening onscreen, as we see via this setup. It’s beautiful, masterfully done. Each of the colors obviously refers to a main character as designatd by the closing animatic, and we’ll next meet White, then Black, then Yellow.

Fourth, notice those credits. Unfortunately, Monty Oum is not the only name whose time in these credits is limited. But we’ll have to talk more about those later.

Finally, notice the sheer scale. This was made to impress. The direction, the design, the cinematography, pretty much every aspect of this piece, in terms of construction, was wonderful. Do not make this your expectation. Quite unfortunately, being shown trailers and shorts that far surpass the actual content of the show will be a trend.

But for right now, everything is good. Let’s move on to the White Trailer.