The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)
An animated prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy done in the Japanese anime style sounds pretty cool, but The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim comes off as a slapdash effort. The reason this film was made was so that New Line Cinema wouldn't lose the film rights to adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's novels, so The War of the Rohirrim was fast-tracked into production.
Set 183 years before the events of
Jackson's trilogy, the story concerns Helm Hammerhand, king of Rohan (voice of
Brian Cox), and his family as they attempt to protect their kingdom from
Dunlending lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) and his son, Wulf (Luca Pasqualino). The
aggressive Wulf has eyes for Helm's daughter, Héra (Gaia Wise), but Héra is an accomplished warrior and isn't
going to submit to Wulf.
The War of the Rohirrim is
directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Napping Princess, Jin-Roh: The Wolf
Brigade) with a screenplay credited to four writers and loosely based on
details in Tolkien's appendices for Lord of the Rings. In the
appendices, Héra was a minor character with no name, so her character was
greatly fleshed out to become the main character of this movie. She's an okay
protagonist, but the character is written pretty thin. There are also some
confusing points in the script, such as a when a character who is near death
inexplicably sports superhuman powers and can literally tear men apart limb
from limb.
Late in the film is
an extended sequence in a snowstorm that is action-packed and visually
exciting. Other times, though, the animation looks cheap with choppy movement
of the characters, and, like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, we often
see the background action on a repeating loop.
This movie is too
bland to resonate like Jackson's live-action films. Hell, even Ralph Bakshi's
1978 animated Lord of the Rings is far better than The War of the
Rohirrim.
