The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

by Mike McGranaghan

Those of us who grew up in the late ‘70s had animated movie versions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. They weren’t great. Although animation could translate the author’s imagery, limitations of the format prevented the stories from being as rich as what was on the page. It wasn’t until Peter Jackson’s early 2000s trilogy that the depth and scope of Tolkien’s work was fully conveyed cinematically. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a throwback to the pre-Jackson era, using gorgeous animation to tell a thin tale.

The film is based on one of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. (Just wait until someone adapts the index and copyright pages!) Vengeful lord Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) launches an attack on the kingdom of Rohan, whose leader he blames for the death of his father. King Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox) must subsequently lead his people in forming a defense. One of his staunchest supporters is his daughter Héra (Gaia Wise). She tries to find a way of avoiding too much bloodshed, but Wulf’s determination to conquer is significant.

The War of the Rohirrim was directed by Kenji Kamiyama, a Japanese filmmaker who previously worked on iterations of Ghost in the Shell and Netflix’s Ultraman series. Under his guidance, the picture looks and plays almost exactly like an anime. While that sounds awesome on the surface, the mixture of that style and the world created by Tolkien comes off awkwardly onscreen. There’s a fast rhythm to anime that can’t fully serve the density of the source material. You don’t get the grand quality that made Jackson’s trilogy so appealing, even to people who wouldn’t normally be into that sort of thing.

What we’re left with are flimsy stock characters making their way through a familiar revenge plot. A weak screenplay fails to develop the players or the battle between them meaningfully. Even the dialogue is cliched. Anime does often rely on tropes as part of its storytelling aesthetic. The Lord of the Rings, by nature, requires more. Forced-in fan service references do the script no favors, either.

The lack of a compelling narrative is unfortunate because, on a purely visual level, the film is nice to look at. It’s got a lot of detail, and the action sequences – although not always as exciting as we’d like – are certainly ambitious. One can’t shake the feeling that all this would have worked better as an animated series, where the appealing visuals could serve a plot that brings added dimension to the old “You killed my father, now I must kill you!” premise.

But it’s not a series, it’s a feature film, and the longer it goes on, the duller and more repetitive it becomes. After screening The War of the Rohirrim, I heard rumors that the movie was made primarily to prevent Warner Bros./New Line from losing the screen rights to LOTR. Whether or not that’s true, I have no idea. The movie definitely comes off that way, though, capitalizing on the name without delivering the goods.

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