Given the success of Peter Jackson’s live-action The Lord of the Rings trilogy and, to a lesser extent, his Hobbit movies, it might come as a surprise to you that the medium used to bring Middle Earth to audiences in the 1970s and 1980s was animation. Disney Studios avoided the subject of Tolkien altogether. These were the first adaptations ever made of Tolkien, and they were all in the form of cartoons. That has never been the case with Disney Studios, however, who shunned the topic entirely. Ralph Bakshi produced a theatrical movie and two television films by Rankin-Bass, both of which comprised animated chronicles of The Lord of the Rings. So, in a sense, Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth (as opposed to the Amazon’s Middle Earth) faction is going back to its roots by going back to animation for the new prequel/spin-off, The War of the Rohirrim. From an aesthetic viewpoint, The War of the Rohirrim is enjoyable to see, although it does have some stylistic hiccups due to a range of reasons. But it visually exceeds even Bakshi’s mix of traditional animation and rotoscoping. Although the storyline is straightforward, which hampers the epic quality of the production, visually it is even more impressive. But as a standalone adventure story, this is quite an interesting episode and a valuable addition to an adjunct of an already limited cinematic universe.
Every filmmaker willing to look for extra stories from appendices of The Lord of the Rings, will never have dearth of such stories (Some of this was done by Jackson to inflate and extend the The Hobbit – a move that Hoffmann later asserted was fraught with troubles, to say the least, in fact, it meant nothing but trouble). We can find the basic framework of the War of the Rohirrim there (Appendix A, for those who want to check it), but now the whole novel and screenplay are just things created by the co-scribe of LOTR movie series, Phillipa Boyens, and the screenwriters Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins (Boyens’ daughter) and Arty Papageorgiou (Jackson and his wife, Fran Walsh, are named as Executive Producers). How much did any of Tolkien’s work contribute? Minimal and I mean minimal. He does get credit for “based on characters created by”. There are some, albeit minimal, elements that anchor this to The Lord of the Rings trilogy but which in the scheme of the story could be construed more as jigsaw pieces.
It was decided to begin telling the story from the perspective of Helm’s daughter, who is voiced by Gaia Wise, daughter of Emma Thompson and Greg Wise. Actually in the book she is only mentioned in passing and even goes without a name, but the producers have decided to give her the name Hera. However, the primary character of The War of the Rohirrim is Walker head Ahsoka because that was them, to avoid many of the warrior princess clichés. According to director Kenji Kamiyama, her figure was based on young girls who act as the lead characters in the works of Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a good description; I found myself quite often thinking of Princesses Nausicaa and Mononoke when watching this story unfold.
On the contrary, Hera’s father, Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), seems to be in the same line with the Tolkien Jackson template of kings whose own failures as able leaders stem from their unchanging pride and an undeserved belief in their ‘kingly’ omniscience – remember another king of Rohan, Thoeden (as played by the late Bernard Hill in The Two Towers and The Return of the King). The main antagonist, Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), would have rather been a lot more nuanced had the film in question set out to portray him so but The War of the Rohirrim rather prefers to stay away from too many greys. His childhood friendship with Hera is mentioned (and even shown off in some scenes via flashbacks) but becomes nothing more than a side note of sorts in the greater plot.
The timeline’s general focus is Wulf’s attempt to destroy Helm, who unwittingly becomes the death of his father, Freca (Shaun Dooley) who was an ambitious and fiercely was of a war clan. Wulf gets together an army of Dunlendings and raids the Rohirrim wishing to overthrow (and use a head-chopping maniac) Helm to declare himself the king. Helm thinks this is just an act and loses Edoras to the invaded forces, realizing that he has no option but to retreat to the fortress that is shown in The Two Towers as Helm’s Deep.
Perhaps the inconsistent quality of animation can be attributed to the pace at which the project was put together. Even companies like Disney usually wait four or more years before they get a feature-length animated movie ready, while independent filmmakers such as Miyazaki may take six or seven years. The War of the Rohirrim barely took 3 years to be completed. Kamiyama, who started his career by doing background for Miyazaki, is mostly an anime director and combines hand-drawn characters with realistic settings. He’s also got live actors to perform the roles, which he uses to inform his motion-captured memories for the 2D images, but doesn’t rotoscope. The end does create what is mostly the desired effect, but as can sometimes happen, the disjunction between the background and the characters can be a tad jarring. This can be observed within the very first scene when a hand-drawn eagle suddenly appears before the viewer and cuts through a brilliantly drawn mountain view.
The War of the Rohirrim, according to the filmmakers, has been constructed by their vision of being fully consistent with Jackson’s tales of Middle Earth. A voiceover is given by Miranda Otto, who returned as Eowyn in The Two Towers and The Return of the King (although fans can only hear her voice and do not see her). The central locations and structures, which include Edoras, Helm’s Deep, and Isengard, sport the same designs that Jackson used for the LOTR trilogy and Stephen Gallagher’s score fuses in elements of Howard Shore’s themes. (I never liked that he did, I would rather have him use more because his stuff is rather clichéd).
Had The War of the Rohirrim been produced as a stand-alone fantasy-adventure film without any association to Tolkien, it would have not been anything out of the ordinary. It’s a well-made, high-quality endeavor, I must say, but the bottom line is that the movie as a whole is just what it is; ordinary production. In a slightly disjointed manner of telling the story, it is still able to get through the core elements but the character’s emotional engagement is conversely very much out of place. I am sure that a non-animated version of this story could have had an altogether different and completely better result. And with regards to the chances of animation being the way going forward for other Middle Earth stories, it is still all to play for.
The War of the Rohirrim, to me, resembles more an experiment than anything. It’s nice for what it’s worth – bringing three pages of the appendix to life – but in the end, it fits the bill of being amusing but not needed. Anime and LOTR die-hards will enjoy it. Others, maybe not so much.
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