Lord Of The Rings anime War Of The Rohirrim gallops down a well-trodden path
The War Of The Rohirrim dives into Rohan's history with an entertaining, Hobbit-sized adventure.
Photo: Warner Bros.
J.R.R. Tolkien doesn’t get much more Heavy Metal than Helm Hammerhand, the legendary King of Rohan and the focus of Lord Of The Rings’ first anime feature, The War Of The Rohirrim. Known for killing a man in a single blow before stalking and murdering his enemies one at a time, Hammerhand ranks among the Tolkien characters most likely to end up airbrushed on the side of the sickest van you’ve ever seen. If there’s a reason to make a 135-minute adaptation of a couple of paragraphs from the Rings’ Appendices, he is it. But his mighty Hammerhands are mighty full.
Both resurrecting Peter Jackson’s beloved Oscar-winning trilogy and an experiment in expanding the Middle-earth cinematic industrial complex, The War Of The Rohirrim is the first theatrically released Lord Of The Rings film since The Hobbit trilogy petered out a decade ago. Not that the franchise is forgotten. The original trilogy’s singular resonance in movie culture, comparable only to Star Wars and The Godfather and bolstered by its overwhelming critical, commercial, and awards success, has found home on top 10 lists, memes, and monthly marathons on TNT over the last 20 years. Returning castmember Miranda Otto, who narrates as Éowyn, smooths over whatever uneven ground this new film traverses. Director Kenji Kamiyama’s uncanny recreation of Jackson’s world makes The War Of The Rohirrim an easy rampart to overtake, retrofitting obscure lore into the familiar aesthetic.
Kamiyama’s team animates the Riddermark audiences first traversed in The Two Towers through a blend of 2-D and 3-D so lifelike it could inspire another tourism surge in New Zealand. The team used motion capture, model work, and hand-drawn animation to create a staggeringly realistic art style, convincingly pushing the idea that a physical camera is moving through these illustrated spaces. It’s reminiscent of the special effects wizardry Wētā Workshop introduced at the turn of the century. However, like Amazon’s The Rings Of Power series, Rohirrim is more fan fiction than adaptation, fleshing out the heretofore unwritten legends of Tolkien’s peripheral and unnamed characters and reducing the myths that colored the edges of Tolkien’s world into recognizable story beats of revenge, unrequited love, and patriarchal control. Kamiyama and his fellowship of screenwriters—Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou, working off a story co-written by LOTR screenwriter Philippa Boyens—time Hammerhand’s legend to Jackson’s rhythms. The rich animation and rote mythmaking counteract each other, turning Rohirrim into a slight Lord Of The Rings adventure that gallops proudly but is unlikely to inspire any songs or ballads—let alone become a necessary addition to series rewatches.