Bored of the Rings | Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim (2024) Movie Review
Do we need a Lord of the Rings anime? 🤔
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I can’t decide whether this is a noble experiment or a cash grab. In truth, like every major motion picture, it’s some combination of both.
We’re currently suffering through some pretty sweaty, uninspired expansions to the worlds of IPs that have proven profitable. Without even leaving Middle-Earth, Amazon’s Rings of Power is the most expensive and most boring television show in history; Dune: Prophecy is dumb and occasionally entertaining, but definitely not good; The Acolyte was an abject, unmitigated narrative disaster that I didn’t bother to suffer through after checking out on The Mandalorian even before it either became (or spun-off?) The Boba Fett Show: He’s a Gangster Now (Sort Of), which I watched a couple of episodes of and hated. Didn’t bother with Ahsoka, either. Star Wars/Disney is a pretty bad offender.
I think, in part as a response to collective bargaining gains made through recent strikes by actors and writers, studios are more loathe than they have ever been to invest in, or pay people to create, brand new ideas.
It’s expensive to create stuff from scratch. And what you — a suit-wearing, responsible, man or man-like businessperson who is serious and important — are actually paying for is for a lazy, difficult, opinionated creative to sit in a room (probably in a beanbag chair, probably drinking liquor or doing marijuana) and doing nothing that you recognize as visible work.
I’m sure it’s galling. I say that as a lifetime, lazy creative. I have empathy. I’d be frustrated if I had to rely on a flaky, smart-aleck, left-brained, froot-loop who didn’t have the good sense to major in literally anything besides Creative Writing, in order to satisfy ravenous shareholders in a very fickle market.
I mean, I don’t have that much empathy. How much business (pun intended) do executive-minded, corporate individuals have in art, anyway? Yes, there’s so much value and money in producing and exhibiting filmed stories, there’s bound to be money-people, but let’s also not forget that these are artistic endeavors, as well. We can do both. We can all get what we want.
Is Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim what we want, though?
I struggled with the anime style tremendously, at first. And I don’t have a very thorough knowledge of anime or animated movies, generally, but this animation didn’t seem to be of especially high quality. The matching of mouth movements to dialogue was abysmal, and I was generally reminded of a Jonny Quest or a Scooby-Doo.
Why British? We could pick any accent and designate it as the default ‘over-there’ or fantasy accent. I say a Kiwi accent.
Imagine if Grand Moff Tarkin had sounded like Taika Waititi’s Korg when obliterating Alderaan. It’s frankly less crazy than some of the changes that have been made to that franchise (“Maclunkey”).
War of the Rohirrim is pretty trope-y. It doesn’t look great, often doesn’t sound great, and the performances are uneven, though Gaia Wise as Héra worked for me, eventually (natural redhead or not)(I don’t know why this bugs me — she’s drawn, her hair can be any color, if you want to make her a redhead, make her an actual redhead!)
The movie just flat-out doesn’t feel even remotely like Lord of the Rings or Middle-Earth or connected in any way to the other IP this film’s success is predicated on our knowing and loving, at least not until the defense of Helm’s Deep. Spoiler alert: in the grand tradition of prequels showing us how the things we like got to be the way that we like them, this is the story of how Helm’s Deep gets its name, and I finally felt the LOTR-ness of it all a bit in the third act.
I think the film realizes this, because up until the third-act last-stand defense of Helm’s Deep, there are bits and bobs of lore and world-building sprinkled in that seem to be more designed to ground us and convince us we’re watching a Lord of the Rings story than to amount to anything or build anything substantive, in its own right.
As I alluded to earlier, the last time I saw an animated feature film was in 1994, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. I was either seven or eight years old, and I remember thinking then that I might be done with seeing animated movies in theatres.
I’m not against them. I’ve attempted to watch a handful of DC and Marvel animated offerings over the years (made it all the way through Season One of What If? which taught me not to bother, going forward), and just never connected with them.
In searching for some sense of growth or personal victory here, I would argue I did eventually overcome my strong prejudice against animated features, and by the end, was giving War of the Rohirrim an actual, open-hearted chance.
It’s okay. That’s my open-hearted, scales-fallen-from-my-eyes assessment. It’s fine.
A lot of War of the Rohirrim feels trivial and inessential, and I don’t feel it contributed substantively to the world of Middle-Earth onscreen, but did I need it to?
Should you see it?
I don’t care.
I found it worth seeing, by the end, but I had to really stick with it through a tough start, and I kept expecting the characters to jump into Voltrons, which made it a bit tough to get into.
For me, the juice was worth the squeeze by the time the credits rolled, but I bet for anyone who wasn’t already dying to see a Lord of the Rings anime or isn’t a diehard fan of everything J.R.R. Tolkien-based, this isn’t going to resonate.
