It’s been a decade since Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema attempted to repeat the massive success of their Lord of the Rings film trilogy with a three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. This was, to quote Sean Bean’s Boromir, folly. The Hobbit cost three times as much to produce for the same return, and no one much cares for it. Nevertheless, WB isn’t about to let their license to the Tolkien legendarium expire, particularly with Amazon lying in wait with another billion-dollar offer to rights owners Embracer Group. In 2022, while buying time to negotiate a long-term extension of their partnership, New Line announced another Lord of the Rings film, this time an animated feature from director Kenji Kamiyama. The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim is a safe bet, a mostly rote medieval fantasy tale that doesn’t have the widespread appeal of Peter Jackson’s trilogy but does keep the spirit of Tolkien’s words alive.
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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM ★★ (2/4 stars) |
Set 200 years before The Hobbit, War of the Rohirrim centers around Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise), Princess of Rohan, the younger, less wealthy of Middle Earth’s human kingdoms. Like most princesses, Hèra is expected to serve her kingdom via a politically advantageous marriage, but she has little interest in politics and even less in romance. She’s an adventurer, a practiced fighter and an unmatched rider even amidst a community that practically worships horses. When Rohan is threatened by a treacherous Lord whose son Wulf (Luca Pasqualino) has loved her since childhood, Héra struggles against not only her country’s foes but her own family for the right to defend those she holds dear.
If this sounds a bit like the tale of Éowyn, the Shieldmaiden of Rohan who defies the King and rides into battle in The Lord of the Rings, that’s not a coincidence. Miranda Otto even reprises the role to serve as this film’s narrator, implying that the tale of Hèra helped inspire Éowyn’s bravery. It’s actually the reverse — while the story’s broad strokes line up with events from the LOTR appendices, the daughter of King Helm Hammerhand doesn’t even get a name in the source material, much less a leading role. War of the Rohirrim fills this negative space with an entire hero’s journey, a tale of courage, compassion, and liberty.
But despite the freedom to invent Hèra practically whole cloth screenwriters Jeffrey Addis, Phoebe Gittins, Will Matthews, and Arty Papageorgiou still wound up with a pretty generic protagonist. Hèra is noble, honest, righteous, clever, and humble, as are her two brothers. There’s hardly a flaw between the three of them, though their father (voiced by Brian Cox) lets his pride and sexism cloud his better judgement. The story’s conflict is entirely between Hèra and the external forces of war and tradition. Do not trust to character interiority — it has forsaken these lands.
Indeed, “generic” is a charge that could be lobbed at almost every element of War of the Rohirrim, from story to character design. Granted, that’s an issue for any Lord of the Rings spin-off, since most of the last 70 years of Western fantasy are derived from Tolkien’s work. But it’s particularly problematic here. The setting could be any fictional feudal kingdom, give or take a giant sentient eagle, and the focus on human characters means there’s not an elf, dwarf, or hobbit in sight. There’s hardly any sorcery afoot.
Where the film honors its source material best is in its fidelity to Tolkien’s most central theme: the resilience of hope and love in the face of despair. War of the Rohirrim builds to an epic climax, but it’s slow going. This animated feature takes nearly as long to reap the benefits of its medium as it does its name brand. Animation and live action have distinct strengths and weaknesses, and for the first 70 minutes (out of 134) very little is gained from Rohirrim being hand-drawn aside from a more manageable budget. The animation itself is also nothing exceptional. It’s rare for a traditional 2D animated feature to receive a wide release in North America and that alone is a treat, but despite a venue bounded only by imagination, War of the Rohirrim lacks ambitious spectacle. Rarely is the audience treated to anything expressionistic or abstract, or to something that would be impractical to shoot in live action.
For fans of high fantasy or anime in general, this may not be a dealbreaker, but The Lord of the Rings trilogy had the then-unprecedented scale and production value to appeal beyond a genre audience. War for the Rohirrim doesn’t have that transcendent quality.
