Turns out Peter Jackson remains a reliable guide to Middle Earth. Ten years after his last
Hobbit movie, he’s now produced
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated movie that takes its narrative from a couple pages in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices and somehow spins satisfying feature-length story out of it. The two listless seasons of Amazon’s
The Rings of Power, which are undeniably expensively made and appealing on that surface level, but are largely dramatically inert, had me doubting that the voluminous prequel lore of this fantasy world was worth mining for more filmmaking. But Jackson isn’t involved in those, and
Rohirrim takes full advantage of what he can bring. Here are the Howard Shore themes, as well as the look and pace of his take on Middle Earth, as well as a knowing love of the source material that sets off the right mythopoeic resonances which make it feel suitably epic and involving. This is both familiar and fresh, by dint of giving anime director Kenji Kamiyama the reins. Once I adjusted to the look of Japanese animation, which is here more restrained and subtle in its embellishments than one might expect, I found it plays mostly like Jackson’s Tolkien. That’s doubly nostalgic for both the prose and world building of Tolkien's books and the now-classic flavor of Jackson's original trilogy. The result also has the deep pleasure of seeing hand-drawn animation on the big screen, an all-too-rare sight and one that feels more beautifully classical and hand-crafted. What an unexpectedly good match.
Set well before the narrative of the earlier movies, this story, adapted by Jackson’s co-writer Philippa Boyens and others, finds the Riders of Rohan fending off an invasion. You might remember them from the siege of Helm’s Deep—the spectacular action climax of
The Two Towers. This is a couple hundred years before that. The King of Rohan (Brian Cox), the awesomely named Helm Hammerhand, turns down a marriage proposal on behalf of his daughter (Gaia Wise). She’s a classically heroic princess who knows how to ride a horse and use a sword, which will come in handy as war approaches and she’ll be key to their people’s defenses. She’s painted as a cool archetype, which helps fill in the details of her personalty. (She’s also designed like a blend between a Miyazaki tomboy, a red-haired Celtic queen, and an hourglass-shaped anime pinup.) The man her father rejects (Luke Pasqualino) decides he’d rather have the throne than her hand, so he gathers an army and the story proceeds through their clashes. The battles that follow are also a little Kurosawa in their scared villagers and amassing armies. There are also warrior princes and wise elders and magic creatures, and it builds to well-drawn combat and nicely rendered catharsis. This gives it the feeling of an old legend recalled to life. (Even the requisite small number of clumsy fan-friendly references aren't
that bad.) It’s all suitably fantastical and epic and makes for a satisfying excuse to return to this world.
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