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In this dark age of assembly line sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, a feature-length anime film set within Middle-earth — specifically in the version of it that Peter Jackson immortalized with his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — qualifies as an appreciably novel method for Warner Bros. to milk a few more dollars from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe. Regrettable as it is that “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is a paper-thin prequel that stretches a single page of Tolkien’s appendices into a 134-minute story of how the fortress of Helm’s Deep got its name (spoiler alert: it was named after a guy named Helm), I suppose we should be grateful that this limp and cheap-looking epic is bad in a few different ways than we’ve come to expect? At least it aspires to mine a fresh experience from the all too familiar tedium of watching Hollywood pick a franchise dry, even if it ultimately falls well short of that goal.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that someone has tried their hand at drawing an animated “Lord of the Rings,” though hand-drawing one — based on motion-captured footage that was converted for reference into 3D within the Unreal Engine — feels radical now in a way that it presumably didn’t when Ralph Bakshi gave it a whirl in 1978. And there’s no denying that the decision to pursue a vintage anime look over a rounder and more digital aesthetic was a good one, as Kenji Kamiyama (who directed the brilliant “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”) and his team adopt a style that fittingly evokes a medieval era of forgotten legends. As Éowyn’s voiceover narration informs us during the movie’s opening moments, a forgotten legend is what “The War of the Rohirrim” is all about.
Her name is Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), she’s the free-spirited and flame-haired princess of Rohan, and though her father is allegedly king Helm Hammerhand (a bellicosely enjoyable Brian Cox), you don’t need a paternity test to know that she got all of her best genes from Hayao Miyazaki. Indeed, Héra is so indebted to the Studio Ghibli founder’s history of headstrong tomboys — Nausicaä most of all — that almost nothing else can or needs to be said about her character, save for the fact that she lacks any of the pluck and vitality that made those other heroines so compelling.
Like Sen before her, Héra would rather spend her time hanging out with giant animals than involving herself in politics, and the first time we meet her she’s actually feeding a massive bird wing of some kind to one of the eagles ex machina from the end of “The Return of the King.” How nice to see those fellas at the start of a movie for once, even if (real spoiler alert this time) they still find a way to show up out of nowhere during the most pivotal moment of the final battle. Héra exudes a dramatically oppressive strength that makes her father want to be that much more protective over her, and also makes it that much harder for him to recognize that she — not her red shirt of a brother or her bland Hemsworth of a cousin — is the obvious heir to his throne.
And the question of succession becomes a particularly urgent one after Helm challenges the hostile Lord of the West March to a hand-to-hand duel, the king of Rohan eventually killing his rival with a single punch to the head (which makes sense when you see that both men are roughly the size of Oliphaunts). The dead man’s son doesn’t take kindly to these events. His name is Wulf, he’s voiced by Luke Pasqualino, and he was Héra’s closest friend and sparring partner when they were children. You’d think that last detail would prove relevant to this story at some point, especially once Wulf and his Dunlending army team up with some dark forces to lay siege against all the people of Rohan who’ve taken refuge within Helm’s Deep (née the Hornburg), but the film’s screenplay — credited to Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Arty Papageorgiou, and Phoebe Gittins, with an assist from the latter’s mother and “The Lord of the Rings” co-writer Philippa Boyens — displays a perverse disinterest in mining that connection for drama or pathos.
Perhaps that’s for the best, as Wulf is a truly ridiculous character who may not have rewarded any further investigation. There are no fewer than four different scenes in the movie where his right-hand man advises him to make a rational decision of some kind, only for Wulf to immediately — often in the very next breath — opt for the rash and violent route instead. It’s illogical the first time, and truly asinine every instance thereafter. It also makes for a painfully dull contrast with Héra’s righteous stoicism; she’s the perfect leader, and he’s a rabid moron. “The War of the Rohirrim” spends most of its time watching our boy Wulf build a single siege tower while Héra speechifies about pride and safety behind the walls of her father’s stronghold (Helm cares too much about the former, and too little about the latter), and that proves to be every bit as unexciting as it sounds.
But at least it’s painful to look at. Honoring Jackson’s grand-but-grounded approach to medieval fantasy, “The War of the Rohirrim” layers realistic character models against lush environments to effectively split the difference between “Berserk” and “Prince Valiant,” though I have to admit that most of the movie reminded me more of JRPG cutscenes than anything else (the Playstation remaster of “Lunar” comes to mind). In theory, that sounds like a fine way of interpolating the iconography of Jackson’s trilogy — the fortress of Isengard in particular — into an anime world. In practice, something has gone awry.
Kamiyama has directed some of the century’s most evocative animation, but his efforts to honor the motion-captured performances of his cast (without rotoscoping over them) have backfired here. I don’t have enough information about the techniques or budgets involved to know what went wrong where, but I do know that Kamiyama probably didn’t intend for Helm to move with all of the fluidity of a chess piece, or for him to look like a cardboard cutout every time he shuffles back and forth in a medium shot meant to suggest that he’s walking. “The War of the Rohirrim” is handsome enough in a still frame, but the characters’ stiff facial animation can’t remotely keep pace with the emotions they’re expressing at a given moment; as Brian Cox bellows about how the Rohirrim will “paint the dawn red with the blood of our foes,” Helm stares blankly into the middle distance as if he were watching “The Hobbit.”
These deficiencies are made all the more frustrating because American studios so rarely indulge in 2D animation of any kind, and also because those deficiencies sour the film’s “Treebeard meets Ghibli” ethos into less of a feature than a bug. Tickling as it might be to see Middle-Earth pay homage to “Princess Mononoke,” “The War of the Rohirrim” isn’t doing itself any favors with the early action sequence in which a corrupted elephant represents the decaying world of men, as the simultaneous combination of ersatz Tolkien with imitation Miyazaki only magnifies this movie’s glaring inability to find any soul of its own.
Such failures make it all the more striking in the rare moments Kamiyama is effectively able to split the difference, as he does when the diseased pachyderm runs afoul of an even deadlier creature, but most of the action here is far too stilted to engage with, and layering it with occasional echoes of Howard Shore’s immortal score for “The Two Towers” only enhances the vertigo-like prequelitis of a movie that makes it feel like Rohan’s best days are behind and ahead of it all at once. Needless to say, it makes all too much sense that Héra’s legend has been forgotten by the time that Aragorn and his friends arrive in her father’s kingdom some two centuries later.
Grade: C-
Warner Bros. will release “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” in theaters on Friday, December 13.
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