When I wrote up my holiday movie preview last week, I wondered if a Japanese anime treatment of The Lord of the Rings would inject some life into the series. Now I’ve seen the animated prequel The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and my answer is a heavily qualified yes.
The story picks up centuries before the events of The Hobbit, when Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox) is the king of Rohan. When one of Helm’s lords (voiced by Shaun Dooley) visits with a marriage proposal between his own son Wulf (voiced by Luke Pasqualino) and Helm’s headstrong daughter Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), the encounter goes south and Helm kills the lord with a single punch. Vowing revenge, Wulf launches a war and personally kills both of Héra’s warrior brothers (voiced by Yazdan Qafouri and Benjamin Wainwright), and with Helm grievously wounded and also insane with grief, Héra has to take charge of the people of Rohan as they flee their capital city and take refuge in the fortress that will become known as Helm’s Deep.
Let’s see, Héra has two brothers, red hair, and a father played by Brian Cox who doesn’t appreciate her. Are we sure she isn’t Shiv Roy? Well, actually, she isn’t as funny, and while Wulf would like to be her husband so he can take over Rohan’s throne, she declares she isn’t interested in marrying anyone. It is strange how neatly this story fits into the templates of anime films, complete with a flashback to Héra and Wulf’s childhood with fake Vaseline-smeared lenses. There is an anime-worthy monster encounter when a rabid Middle Earth elephant chases after our heroine and she leads the animal into something even bigger that can take it down. Also, a nice subplot forms when Wulf’s army besieges Helm’s Deep during the winter and something starts picking off his soldiers a few at a time at night under the cover of snow.
For all that, director Kenji Kamiyama (who did Napping Princess) doesn’t do enough to bring memorable visuals to Middle Earth, and Héra’s rebelliousness and chafing at her father’s strictures on women aren’t enough to make her interesting. The film lasts 134 minutes, which is considerably shorter than any of Peter Jackson’s movies, and yet it feels a good deal longer because the action largely stops during the siege. This film brings back Miranda Otto as Éowyn, who serves as the story’s voiceover narrator, and reveals the existence of a cadre of female warriors who defended Rohan after the male soldiers were killed off, but the gender flip doesn’t work as well as you or the filmmakers might hope. Compared to other anime films, this is middling fare at best.
And yet this is an anime version of Lord of the Rings, and we shouldn’t overlook what that means. If Jackson’s flair for large-scale battle sequences has been lost, so too have his ponderous storytelling rhythms. Heaven knows that Tolkien’s lore is short on stories about women, so the female heroine here brings a fresh sensibility to the series. It’s not enough to make War of the Rohirrim into a good movie, but it does indicate a way forward. Sadly, it will have to be the next movie about Middle Earth that takes it there.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Voices by Gaia Wise, Brian Cox, and Luke Pasqualino. Directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Written by Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou. Rated PG-13.
