RWBY Chibi

Join the cast of RWBY in a new series of cute, comedy shorts with infinite possibilities! It's playing tag! It's baking cookies! It's posing as police officers! It's... really quite absurd. It's RWBY CHIBI!

RWBY Chibi is an animated web series and spin-off of RWBY produced by Rooster Teeth Productions. The show features stylized "chibi" versions of RWBY characters and focuses on lighthearted comedy rather than plot and drama.

Summary
Each episode is around 3 minutes long and consists of several lighthearted self-contained comedy shorts (or segments) with little to no overarching storyline. Individual shorts range from a few seconds to a few minutes in length.

RWBY Chibi is non-canon to the continuity of the main show.

Release
The show was first announced as part of Rooster Teeth's 13th Anniversary celebrations on April 1st, 2016. Sneak peeks of the show were shown as extra content at RWBY Tugg screenings on April 27th, 2016.

The first episode premiered on May 7th, 2016 as part of Rooster Teeth's "Summer of Animation", alongside Camp Camp and Red vs. Blue Season 14. Like RWBY, episodes are released weekly, airing on Saturdays for Rooster Teeth sponsors and the following day for registered users of the site. Episodes are also uploaded to YouTube the week following the sponsor release.

RWBY Chibi is scheduled to run weekly until the start of RWBY Volume 4, which is set to premiere on October 22nd, 2016 (presumably totalling 24 episodes). It may also return in subsequent hiatuses between Volumes.

Development
Original ideas for shorts stemmed from collaborative pitching sessions, where various Rooster Teeth staff members were invited to share ideas and jokes that could be further developed into shorts. Shorts each have their own titles and are worked on by individual teams.

The show is animated in 3D in the program Autodesk Maya, unlike previous volumes of RWBY, which were animated in Smith Micro's Poser. Animators were also given much more creative freedom than on the main show, as shorts are less closely storyboarded, allowing them to get their own intuitive feel for the comedic timing of the shorts. Unlike the main series, RWBY Chibi does not use motion capture.

The animation team working on the spin-off show is separate to the team working on Volume 4 of RWBY.

Soundtrack
Jeff Williams and Alex Abraham, who compose the music for the main series, also worked on the music for RWBY Chibi. The music includes remixes and rearrangements of songs from the RWBY soundtrack in a variety of styles, including 8-bit versions, as well as new compositions. Casey Lee Williams contributed vocals.

Alex Abraham uploaded some tracks from the soundtrack to his SoundCloud for free public streaming.
 * "Mirror Mirror (Ice Queen Remix)"
 * "From Shadows (Little Black Bow Remix)"
 * "Beacon Theme (Carnival Remix)"
 * "I Burn (PleaseDon'tSueUs Remix)"
 * "Ren is 'It'"
 * "Boop (Pancakes Remix)"
 * "Little Red Riding Hood"

Characters


The characters of RWBY Chibi are noted as having slightly different personas to their counterparts from RWBY. For example, Miles Luna says that chibi Jaune is more "angry and feminine" than his canon incarnation, while chibi Ruby is "kind of a little shit".

Most characters have one or more unique screen wipes that transition between scenes in an episode. Each wipe matches the character's personality and theme, for example, Ren's takes the shape of a yin-yang symbol, while Zwei's wipe takes the shape of dog bones.