Review: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Our Take

The Rohirrim refers to the name of the people that inhabit Rohan with the war actually being amongst different heirs to a throne that isn’t even up for grabs just yet, but early on this leaves King Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox) with his back up against the wall and get into a war that he accidentally kicks off. Set almost 200 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, I’ve always envisioned prequels to help answer questions that may have been there from the movies, like “why did Anakin become Vader” type of questions. That really doesn’t happen here, instead it’s a tale of how Helm’s Deep formed, with a couple of nods to characters that show up in the live-action movies though with no real depth.

Instead, if you were looking for a cameo fest over the course of this two plus hour 2D animated film, I hate to tell you, you’re going to be disappointed. Fortunately, there’s enough here to latch on to that I don’t think the film needs any special cameos to make it pull through. For starters, the voice-acting is top-notch, Brian Cox’s character “Helm” goes all Brock Lesnar as he mows through armies, Gaia Wise portrays “Hera” our lead heroine hoping to buck a trend on what a woman’s place is in society even in a society that is fantasy. Lastly, Luke Pasqualino portrays our protagonist “Wolf”, a guy who has his heart broken decades earlier and is still salty about all these years later.

There is a light smattering of iconic voices and characters from The Lord of the Rings films including Miranda Otto reprising her role as Éowyn who narrates our tale and Christopher Lee posthumously voices Saruman through an archival recording which is so fast that if you were to miss it I wouldn’t blame you and instead would comfort you in letting you know that there probably wasn’t any real reason for Saruman to being the film anyway. Mûmakils become an accessory to Wulf’s attempt to overthrow the standing empire and we even get a quick cameo from some orcs and a horned troll, but that’s it for the stuff you’d recognize from the Peter Jackson films. Oh, that and maybe the eagles from the very tale end of Return of the King.

The aesthetic of the film is clearly anime-inspired, but I’m not so sure director Kenji Kamiyama wasn’t also giving us a bit of a gloss over inspired by Ralph Bakshi which probably wouldn’t be difficult to do considering this film spent $30 million with 60 different animation studios and the film’s action sequences are worth every penny. While gory, the film clearly tries to stay in PG-13’s arena as much as it can and successfully does just that. Although described as anime, the film includes a number of different animation stylings including 2D backdrops with Unreal Engine-produced actors doing mo-cap but no rotoscoping ala the aforementioned Bakshi efforts. The musical score from Stephen Gallagher clearly makes sure to keep homage the iconic Howard Shore score from the feature-length live-action films though at times I felt early on some of the voice recordings for the actors came off a bit muffled with some clear mixing errors to boot.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is by far producer Jason DeMarco’s most polished licensed effort to date. The long-time Toonami producer has been adept in taking franchises like Blade Runner, Junji Ito, and others and sinking them into the bottom of the ocean and not taking accountability as a result. Fortunately, he won’t have to for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim for he has a definite winning effort here that I hope leads to more animated projects inspired by Tolkien novels.