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The days of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy feel as innocent now as those little hobbits frolicking, unburdened, in the Shire - three films adapted with sincerity, before the disastrous Hobbit prequels, and before the modern resuscitation of the franchise. Andy Serkis is directing The Hunt for Gollum, which is scheduled for 2026, and this week we have Kenji Kamiyama's The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime film that takes place 183 years before Frodo Baggins. But despite offering us a different medium and a different era, the world of JRR Tolkien has never felt smaller.
The War of the Rohirrim draws from the appendices to Tolkien's novels, a compendium of Middle Earth history, which mentions an old and ferocious ruler of the equestrian peoples of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand (voiced by a suitably grandiloquent Brian Cox). It imagines what pivotal role his unnamed daughter, here called Héra (Gaia Wise, daughter of Emma Thompson), may have played. The film's villain is Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), leader of the Dunlendings, who takes vengeance after he's denied Héra's hand in marriage and watches his father die from a single punch by the notably beefy Helm.
Yet as the strings of Howard Shore's old theme, embellished by Stephen Gallagher, rise up, so does an unshakeable sense of familiarity. Helm is a stern patriarch, who bars Héra from the fight, only for her to disobey his orders - the same strife shared between Éowyn (Miranda Otto) and her uncle Théoden (Bernard Hill). Otto's back to provide narration, while the film's screenwriters seem happy to borrow her mic-drop of a line from Return of the King ("I am no man!"), toss in a couple extra words, and hand it straight over to Héra.
Every possible callback seems jammed into The War of the Rohirrim's crevices: a piece of archival audio of Christopher Lee (who died in 2015) as Saruman; a beast of the same tentacled, squid-like species as The Fellowship of the Ring's Watcher in the Water; orcs hunting for rings; the Great Eagles, who famously do not like to impose on the narrative; the Haradrim, the walking Orientalist tropes, and their elephant steeds, the Mûmakil. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd return to voice roles unrelated to Merry and Pippin.
In short, it too visibly bears the wounds of its circumstances - it was fast-tracked by Warner Bros so that the studio could hold onto the film rights to Tolkien's books and, presumably, fight back against Amazon's competing Rings of Power series. While still primarily hand-drawn, CG animation was more heavily deployed in the planning of shots, and the creation of backgrounds, and the result feels more inconsistent than it does ambitious. Kamiyama does have a similar eye to Peter Jackson when it comes to finding the beautiful in the grotesque, so it's not so hard to imagine how striking a Lord of the Rings anime could look if it weren't so invested in the business of replication.
And, while it's certainly nice to see a new Lord of the Rings film with a heroine at its centre, its steely, grunting parade of warriors have lost the tenderness and emotional sincerity that screenwriters Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens originally teased out of Tolkien's text, and granted to men and women alike. The War of the Rohirrim is invested entirely into convincing you it's just like the films you know and love. Yet, again and again, along comes that sinking suspicion this is just another corporate wolf in sheep's clothing.
Dir: Kenji Kamiyama. Starring: Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, Miranda Otto. Cert 12A, 134 mins.
