The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Oh, so that’s why I never got into anime. The plain truth is, with animation, no matter how pretty are the pictures you draw, at the end of the process the characters are simply cartoon characters. That’s fine for certain types of stories, but for others the animation treatment trivializes the project. So it is here. This telling of the Tolkien substory simply lacks the gravitas that Peter Jackson’s original trilogy brought in spades. This should hardly have come as any surprise, as earlier animated versions of the main LOTR story had the same problem, and were largely confined to the memory hole until the iconic live-action movies came along and revitalized interest in the old man’s masterwork. So this deck of drawings was stacked against itself from the start, regardless of the visual innovations brought by the Japanese masters of the form. On its own terms, this flick plays it relatively straight—there aren’t too many of the physical absurdities typical of anime, especially as regards to the fight scenes—which is a good thing, and tells a tale that contains a solid amount of interest, even if it is at best tangential to the main story of Middle-Earth. (Not that the script doesn’t make at least token [Tolkien?] efforts to tie this piece into the overall story thread.) One major plus is the depiction of the main (and made-up for this movie) character of Hera, not just as a story persona but also because she is presented as a smokin’ hot redhead (those anime artists definitely know their way around drawing females). Still, this script is otherwise fairly true to its source material, so a fan can’t complain too much. As noted, there was once a time when the idea of a major movie release based on LOTR would have been absurd, so best not to look a gift Hobbit in the mouth. (Sorry, no actual Hobbits here, though one young character of the Rohirrim tries to fill that void.) Maybe future efforts will learn from this piece’s flaws and offer an improved effort. Or maybe they can just stick to live-action productions, since those are the true, proven winners. That, then, really would be something worth blowing your horn about.