The War of the Rohirrim

Rated PG-13 • Theaters

A little more than 20 years ago, Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson took J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece The Lord of the Rings and adapted its 1,200 pages into an epic trilogy that spanned 9 hours and 18 minutes (or 11 hours and 23 minutes if you watch the extended editions). About 10 years later, he took the 300 or so pages of Tolkien’s children’s book The Hobbit and created another trilogy that runs to almost eight hours (or nine if you can suffer through the extended ­edition). Then a couple of years ago, Amazon and New Line Cinema created a multi-season series called The Rings of Power from a little over 100 pages’ worth of appendices found at the back of Tolkien’s The Return of the King.

How many more hours of adaptations can be squeezed out of ever-slimmer page counts? New Line aims to find out.

The studio’s latest offering based on Middle-earth is The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a 2-hour-10-minute animated movie based on a mere 2½ pages from one of Tolkien’s appendices.

The film, set on the plains of Rohan, takes place more than 200 years before Jackson’s movies, and it purports to tell the story of Helm Hammerhand, the namesake of Helm’s Deep, the fortress that played a prominent role in the second installment of the trilogy, The Two Towers.

Helm might be king, but the real hero of the movie is his daughter Héra, a headstrong shieldmaiden with fiery red hair.

The action begins when an unsuitable suitor named Wulf asks for Héra’s hand in marriage and Helm refuses to grant his request. The king’s pride leads to tragedy, and Wulf becomes an implacable enemy of the Rohirrim. He launches an attack against Edoras, the capital of Rohan, seeking revenge against Helm, his two sons—Haleth and Hama—and Héra, who spurned his affections. The Rohirrim flee to Helm’s Deep attempting to outlast a siege during a bitter winter that takes its toll on both sides.

I’m not sure this film understands its target audience. It attempts to tie its story to Jackson’s original trilogy, but I can’t imagine passing fans being tempted to watch an anime about this obscure battle. The script feels derivative, and its excessive liberties will likely offend many die-hard fans of Tolkien. In the 2½ pages of the appendix, Helm’s daughter isn’t named, and she certainly isn’t the hero. Héra’s adventure in the film feels like a pastiche of Eowyn’s story from The Return of the King melded with various warrior-princess clichés from other media.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of this film is the decision to render it using Japanese animation. Veteran anime director Kenji Kamiyama filmed the actors with motion capture and then used computer 3D renderings as the basis for his 2D hand-drawn scenes. It makes for some interesting imagery, but there’s a visual dissonance between Kamiyama’s Japanese style and the Northern European culture of Tolkien’s Rohirrim. The big question is why would the studio want to make a Lord of the Rings anime?

I suspect New Line’s reasoning went something like this: “Nerds like Tolkien, and nerds like anime; therefore, nerds will love a Tolkien anime.” I have my doubts as to whether this syllogism is sound.