Lo, back in the 13th century of the Second Age (well, 1969 anyway), the wags at National Lampoon, already wearied by orcs and hobbits, published a parody of JRR Tolkien’s most famous work, entitled Bored of the Rings. Characters called Pepsi and Goulash. “A plover’s egg as big as an emerald.” And so on.
Little did National Lampoon know what was coming and how long it would come for. More than half a century later the revival that began with Peter Jackson’s millennial trilogy now reaches a discretely promoted anime from the experienced Kenji Kamiyama. As you won’t need to be told, the writers have trawled through provisional lore – specifically the appendices from the original books – to deliver a prequel that will have hard-core fans both salivating and tearing their hair out. Apparently, some nerds are already upset that giant killer elephants called mûmakil are somewhere Tolkien never told us they would be.
They should have a flagon of mead and relax. Yes, some of the dialogue here really does play like Bored of the Rings. “By her hands many great deeds were done,” a voiceover says of the heroine early on. (What is it with imagined mythology and curiously structured passive voice? 3/10 See me after class.) But, those quibbles noted, The War of the Rohirrim is better than a place-holding animation needed to be.
Rich in Tolkien’s melange of Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxony, the piece is also at home to brutal anime-compliant surrealism, such as when a fanged freshwater octopus chews up one of those unfortunate elephants. There is certainly something of Hayao Miyazaki’s heroines in the plucky Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise, daughter of Emma Thompson) – wide-eyed, courageous, stubborn – as she gathers forces to assist her side of a violent civil war. We are some distance from Jackson’s sometimes desperate efforts to inject female energy into his take on Tolkien’s pipe-and-slippers, gentleman’s-club prose.
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It is nearly two centuries before the events in Lord of the Rings as Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox in full voice), king of Rohan, enters shouty negotiations with the rival Dunlendings. The parlay goes sufficiently badly to persuade Helm and Freca, lord of that opposing force, to step outside for fisticuffs. One blow knocks Freca dead and causes his son Wulf to vow vengeance on the entire Rohan enterprise. Allies of Helm defect and his tribe is forced to retreat towards the fortress that, years hence, will be remembered as Helm’s Deep. A siege follows.
Apparently, live humans acted out every scene; after motion capture, those performances were translated into 3D and then 2D animation. In truth, a few crowd scenes apart, the film looks pretty much as we expect traditional Japanese anime to look. The later scenes around the besieged castle have a painterly menace you don’t get from live action. There is a welcome artificiality to the motion.
The whole thing stands in useful contrast to the wearisome Transformers One from earlier in the year. That animation played neither as Saturday-morning cartoon nor as big-screen epic. A sense of awful desperation dogged its ugly progress to minimal returns. Featuring a fleshed-out rivalry between Héra and her childhood pal Wulf, the current film manages to be both an enjoyably gory epic in its own right and a useful addition to Lord of the Rings lore. We get a significant glimpse of orcs up to mischief. A closing guest appearance (which we won’t spoil) waves off any suspicions that The War of the Rohirrim might not be in the same universe as Jackson’s films.
There is nothing here to win over those habitually ill disposed to sword and sorcery, but anybody half on board should have a decent time. It is certainly a heck of a lot better than the over-extended Hobbit trilogy.
In cinemas from Friday, December 13th
