‘The War of the Rohirrim’ is a bungled anime echo of ‘The Lord of the Rings’

The one thing it excels at is mimicry. Howard Shore's iconic music from Jackson’s trilogy can be heard as soon as War of the Rohirrim begins, along with an opening voiceover and a sketched map of Middle Earth, just like in those films. Even when new composer Stephen Gallagher tries to put his spin on things, he laces Shore's iconic suites throughout his score. This applies to practically every facet of the film, which is only ever truly intriguing when observed at a distance, as a creative tug-of-war between Rings nostalgia and…well, "originality" isn't quite the word. When the film isn't echoing Jackson's trilogy, it's usually pulling noticeably from somewhere else, often ineffectively.

Set in the tiny kingdom of Rohan—the setting of much of Jackson's The Two Towers—The War of the Rohirrim centers on a red-haired princess clad in a green dress, Héra (Gaia Wise), who fancies herself a warrior, but whose family wants to marry her off for the sake of a royal treaty. Were you to swap the movie's Welsh and Germanic names for Scottish, you'd have Pixar's Brave to a T.

Rohirrim does, however, have something neither Brave nor Rings ever did: a sexy antagonist, in the form of the brooding Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), the prince of a rival kingdom, whose brutish father Freca (Shaun Dooley) demands Héra's hand. Wulf and Hera have a childhood history—glimpsed only in one flashback—but his presence is a shot in the arm for the Middle Earth saga, which has long lacked an alluring bad boy (Amazon's TV prequel The Rings of Power understood this). However, as exciting as this may be on paper, Wulf is immediately sidelined when Héra's father, King Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), banishes Wulf and his family from their land.

Freca voiced by Shaun Dooley in "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim."

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

While Wulf eventually resurfaces as a vengeful antagonist, he usually has henchmen and other warriors do his bidding, and seldom interacts with Héra. What's more, he's the closest thing the movie has to a fleshed-out character with lucid motivations, making it hard not to root against the movie's ostensible heroes as they lumber from scene to scene—and I do mean lumber. There's a distinct lethargy to the animation, with characters moving at snail-speed and giving lengthy pauses between each line, filling the space with dead air at every turn. Even the numerous battle scenes are sluggish. It's often difficult to look at, and it rarely has a coherent sense of size or scale (an area where Jackson's movies broke new ground).

In addition to its aesthetic oddities, The War of the Rohirrim’s very conception feels strange. Set nearly 200 years before The Two Towers, the film is narrated by a supporting character from that film, Eowyn (Miranda Otto), though you wouldn't know this until you read the closing credits. Eowyn's story was one of defying gendered expectations and taking up arms as a warrior, a role reserved for Rohan's men (the Rohirrim of the title). In her voiceover, she frames Héra's tale as a forgotten history, though one with unremarked upon similarities to her own. Within the story itself, Rohan is said to have once been rife with "Shieldmadiens" who took up arms—albeit after the kingdom's men had perished—a history that appears to have all but been erased. It now exists in tapestries and burnt scrolls, but Héra herself seldom draws from these stories, and doesn't seem to have had a lasting change on the kingdom, if Eowyn has to go through the same struggles down the line.

With neither a larger history to cling to, nor much of a personality beyond her place in the plot, Héra adds little to The War of the Rohirrim beyond the broad strokes of feminine empowerment as a mere corporate concept. With a price tag of $30 million (Warner Bros.’ most expensive 2-D animated film since 1999), all they have to protect their investment is the vague, Barbie-esque idea that a few words of affirmation—sans any rigorous self-reflection or struggle for transformation—are enough to satisfy the market's demands for a "strong female character," which pales in comparison to complexity and nuance most of the time.

From left, Wulf and Héra in "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim."

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Even the women of Jackson's Middle Earth—few and far between though they may be—overcame the broad strokes of Tolkein's literary opera, and were defined by deeply human concerns like romance, mortality, and corruption. The animated prequel may copy Jackson's movies, down to specific shots and sound cues, but it misses the fundamental humanity at the heart of the traditional fantasy epic: the idea that virtue and vice live in close proximity, and anyone can succumb to darkness. Greek tragedies knew it. Tolkein and Jackson knew it. The War of the Rohirrim, however, forgets it in favor of moral binaries that makes its story far less interesting.