The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim: an epic anime replay of signature Lord of the Rings moments
Director Kamiyama Kenji expands on J. R. R. Tolkien’s source material with an all too familiar animated adventure that follows teen heroine Héra, shieldmaiden of Rohan.
“I am bride to no man,” proclaims the teenage protagonist Héra at a climactic moment in the anime epic The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. She makes the statement no less proudly than her later kinswoman Éowyn announcing “I am no man!” to the Witch-king of Angmar before slaying him in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
Héra’s trajectory from a would-be shieldmaiden, overly protected by her father Helm Hammerhand, to the heroine of the Rohirrim’s war against the wild Dunlendings of Middle-earth, closely mirrors Eowyn’s. The hushed voiceover narration by Miranda Otto, who played Eowyn in The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003), underscores this symmetry and helps sustain the Anglo-Nordic Middle-earth imaginary that Jackson honoured in The Lord of the Rings but squandered in The Hobbit movies.
Whereas Héra is a princess dreamed up by The War of the Rohirrim screenwriters, Helm is named as the ninth King of Rohan in ‘The House of Eorl’ section of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings appendices. The brief description of the war that ended his reign nearly two centuries before the War of the Ring has been expanded into this film’s non-stop girl-power action saga.
Director Kamiyama Kenji, who created backdrops for Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and has directed episodes of the animated TV series Star Wars: Visions (2021), brings a visually arresting array of canted angles, tracking shots, and swooping eagle POV shots to The War of the Rohirrim. A sequence showing Héra emerging from a mountain tunnel to see (and smell) Orcs on a snowy ledge, and the sight of Helm’s frozen corpse standing erect before the Dunharrow fortress are richly Tolkienesque. The late appearance of Saruman (posthumously voiced by Christopher Lee via sound editing) feels contrived, however.
Despite the film’s legions of animators, shots of humans and beasts in motion are disconcertingly jerky compared with Studio Ghibli’s equivalents or those in the early passages of Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings (1978). The Dunlendings are a strangely thin rabble, in contrast to Jackson’s CGI hordes. The calculated replication of signature moments from The Lord of the Rings – Héra’s lonely wait (like Eowyn’s) outside the Golden Hall of the Kings of Rohan, a huge cephalopod disturbed in a pool, an agile blond warrior fighting atop a six-tusked mûmakil – renders them tropes. Brian Cox’s voicing of the Thor-like Helm makes him almost as fearsome as Cox’s Logan Roy in Succession (2018-2023). Sadly, Gaia Wise’s Hampstead-y tones are an ill fit for Tolkien’s idea of a pre-historical English myth.
The War of the Rohirrim regrettably indulges one of anime’s worst tendencies by eroticising the appearance of its teen heroine. Wise has said she drew on Miyazaki’s Nausicaä from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) for Héra’s bravery and empathy. But unlike Nausicaä, it feels like Héra has been animated with a decidedly male gaze, with her flowing hair, girlish face, and voluptuous body of a sexualised waifu or demure bishōjo. That she rides off finally with an older shieldmaiden after emphatically renouncing men gives her a pleasing ambiguity.
► The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim arrives in UK cinemas 13 December.