Director – Kenji Kamiyama, Screenplay – Jeffrey Addiss, Phoebe Gittins, Will Matthews & Arty Papageorgiou, Story – Jeffrey Addiss, Philippa Boyens & Will Matthews, Producers – Philippa Boyens, Joseph Chou & Jason DeMarco, Music – Stephen Gallagher, Based on Themes by Howard Shore, Animation – Sola Animation (Chief Animation Supervisor – Miyako Takasu), Visual Effects – Weta FX (Supervisor – Matt Aitken). Production Company – Warner Bros. Animation/Sola Entertainment.
Voices
Gaia Wise (Hera), Brian Cox (Helm Hammerhand), Luke Pasqualino (Wulf), Lorraine Ashbourne (Olwyn), Laurence Ubong Williams (Frealaf), Miranda Otto (Eowyn), Shaun Dooley (Freca), Benjamin Wainwright (Haleth), Yazdan Qafouri (Hama), Bilal Hasna (Lief), Michael Wildman (General Targg), Jude Akuwudike (Lord Thorne), Billy Boyd (Shank), Dominic Monaghan (Wrot), Christopher Lee (Saruman)
Plot
180 years before the War of the Ring. Freca, a lord of the Westmarch, comes to the court of Edoras in Rohan to seek the hand of the king Helm Hammerhand’s daughter Hera for his son Wulf. The independently minded Hera is already betrothed to a lord of Gondor but does not want to be married to either. Helm challenges Freca to a duel to settle things but ends up killing him with the very first blow. Wulf swears vengeance and leaves. Many years later, Hera is abducted and taken to Wulf, now lord among the Dunlending, who still wants her as his wife. She is rescued but this precipitates a war as Wulf and his armies march on Edoras. Hera realises that this is a trap and they have been betrayed from within. She manages to evacuate the people to take refuge at the great fort of the Hornburg.
Christopher Tolkien, the trustee to the Tolkien copyright, was for many years the equivalent of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at all film interest in the properties. The death of Christopher in 2020 seems to have opened the way for the broadening of the Tolkien vision on screen and we now have new works with the tv series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022- ) and now The War of the Rohirrim, an animated spinoff. The story here has been adapted from the history of the people of Rohan that appears in one of the vast appendices to the books.
Hera (left) and her father Helm Hammerhand (middle) at the throne of Edoras
The War of the Rohirrim has been placed in the directorial hands of Kenji Kamiyama. He was the animation director on Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1998) and then directed anime tv series such as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002-5) and several of the follow-up works, Eden of the East (2009) and Blade Runner: Black Lotus, plus other films such as 009: Re:Cyborg (2012), Napping Princess (2017) and Eden No 831 (2022), as well as the script for Blood: The Last Vampire (2000).
The War of the Rohirrim is very much an extension of the Peter Jackson films – Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens all serve as executive producers, while Boyens comes up with the story and the actual screenplay is written by her daughter Phoebe Gittins, while Jackson’s production company Wingnut Films presents the film.
The War of the Rohirrim came with great fanfare – certainly the most of any of the anime spinoffs of assorted franchises, it was even given a release in IMAX. But in arrival it comes out with the disappointment down there somewhere with Jackson’s The Hobbit sequels. It is epically poised fantasy, certainly has its feet planted in Middle Earth lore and places names. But where you wanted it to soar with an Epic Fantasy feel, it plods instead.
Hera confronts Wulf
A good part of the film seems conceived to play to fanservice. There are return performances from Miranda Otto, credited as Eowyn again, who narrates the story; Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan who played Merry and Pippin in the first trilogy turn up, this time voicing two orcs; and Christopher Lee’s voice has been sampled to provide an appearance from Saruman at the end. There is no Andy Serkis but his wife Lorraine Ashbourne voices the role of shield maiden Olwyn. Furthermore, the film draws on the designs for Isengard, Helm’s Deep and Edoras from Jackson’s films. Moreover, there are little references littered throughout the story to orcs collecting rings for their master and a final scene about going off to meet a wizard named Gandalf.
The War of the Rohirrim gets all its Tolkien places and names right, it pays its fanservice. On the other hand, it never quite inspires. There are a variety of battle scenes but nothing earth-shattering. I wanted it to be another The Two Towers, the peak of the Jackson films, or even something of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997), the nearest anime has come to capturing the epic spirit of Tolkien. Instead it plods more down at the level of a lesser historical epic.
I think part of the problem is Peter Jackson Bloat, which allowed a mid-sized book like The Hobbit to get extruded out into three three-hour films. There is the determination to build The War of the Rohirrim out into an epic, which is not something that is always sustained by the film itself. There is the feel it is dragging its feet, lingering over story, detail and little pieces of lore tie-in when it should have been heading for the epical.
