Director – Kenji Kamiyama – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 134m
****
A story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, set around 200 years before The Lord of the Rings – English language anime is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 13th
This narrative is based on one of the appendices in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, (although checking my copy of the 1979 Unwin paperback edition, it’s not there, so it’s unclear when this appendix first appeared). The Kingdom of Rohan and the Battle of Helm’s Deep are familiar from Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, as is the character of Éowyn (voice: Miranda Otto, reprising her role) who serves here as a narrator, the tale taking place around 200 years before the events in LOTR.
Wulf (voice: Elijah Tamati) and Hèra (voice: Bea Dooley) are childhood friends, sweethearts even. She is something of a tomboy, riding out of the small fiefdom – from where her father Helm Hammerhand (voice: Brian Cox) rules his Kingdom of Rohan – to feed a giant eagle, or engage in friendly, hand-to-hand, sword and shield combat with Wulf, at which task she bests him.
Fast-forward a decade or so, and Wulf’s overweight father Freca (voice: Shaun Dooley), irate at Helm’s refusal to allow Hèra (voice: Gaia Wise) to marry Wulf (voice: Luca Pasqualino) – which would unite his kingdom with that of Rohan – fights Helm in hand-to-hand combat to settle the matter. Hèra, incidentally, whilst she harbours feelings for Wulf, is a free spirit who has no plans to marry. But that decision is in the hands of her father. Helm’s first blow – after several landed on him by Freca – fells the man, unexpectedly killing him. From this point on, the two kingdoms are effectively at war.
Following various skirmishes and betrayals, Helm, his forces, and his people retreat to the mountainside fortress Hornburg, later (and in the LOTR trilogy) to become known as Helm’s Deep. Wulf, driven by both his emotions and his desire for retribution, and against the advice of his savvy military strategist General Targg (voice: Michael Wildman), lays siege to Hornburg. As he and his forces play the waiting game, and Helm himself struggles with injuries sustained in battle, Wulf’s men report a mysterious wraith prowling outside Hornburg at night…
This latest LOTR movie is a mixed bag. Whilst the story emanated from Tolkien, and is most definitely a Middle-earth story, Tolkien’s version is fairly scant, and the story outline has been largely fleshed out by Philippa Boyens, also one of the film’s three producers, who did such a fantastic job helping Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (both credited here as two of the film’s nine (!) executive producers) write the scripts for their LOTR films. She does an excellent job again here, sharing co-story credit with two writers who in turn share their two screenwriter credits with two more screenwriters.
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t attempt a feminist tract rewriting male roles as females; however, it does take a minor female character (Tolkien never bothered to name King Helm’s daughter) and deploy her – and a female narrator from later, more familiar times – as a vehicle through whom the story can be told. It doesn’t soft-soap the idea that only men can rule. Thus, the daughter’s fitting in with that whole social construct, however much of a rebel she might be, proves completely believable. There is also a certain injustice about the fact, which is perhaps the best way of making the point.
Tolkien’s myth-making and world-building come from a time when the subservient role of women to men wasn’t questioned as it is today, and perhaps to attempt to inject such an agenda into the material would be to do it a disservice. Nevertheless, women and girls, seeing this film, will recognise it as a film about their gender, albeit one which takes place in a heavily patriarchal social set-up.
Overall, you sense Boyens’ hand guiding both the script and the production. The filmmakers have not repeated the “let’s make another trilogy and therefore lots of money” misjudgement of The Hobbit: this is on the one hand a standalone two-and-a-quarter-hours film, which feels about the right length, rather than the first film in another overly thin trilogy. Warner Bros. Animation is involved as one of the co-production partners, as is Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films.
The look of the film has been deliberately crafted to fit in with the LOTR films, so that, when you see Rohan, it’s recognisable as such. Hornburg is clearly the place that was later renamed Helm’s Deep. Isengard also puts in an appearance. Although you’re watching animation – anime – such familiar locations immediately link this film to the live action LOTR films. The drawn animation backgrounds are beautifully rendered – something Japanese animation has always been good at – and there are a small number of scenes travelling through impressive, fully dimensional, CG environments, such as the wood through which Hèra flees on horseback fairly early on.
And yet, the decision to use animation – anime – is a strange one, given the complex and convincing level of special effects in the live action films, as if someone had decided to use animation because it was cheaper, and would enable the producers to knock off further movies based on LOTR appendices or footnotes or story outlines from Tolkien’s ambitious, complete history of Middle-earth, The Silmarrillion.
Here, the approach sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
When there are casts of thousands type scenes, such as hordes of cavalry, you yearn to be watching live action footage (which would, ironically, probably be heavily augmented by CG). The same is true with the giant elephant lured into an encounter with a deadly, tentacled underwater maw in the opening twenty or so minutes – in both cases, the animation feels cheap and undermines the visual concept of the spectacular – it’s the same problem that beset the dragons in that other anime adaptation of Western fantasy Tales from Earthsea (Goro Miyazaki, 2006).
Yet, when the film is more intimate – characters interacting in rooms, hand-to-hand combat involving two or three characters – it’s more successful. Nowhere is this more evident than in the middle section where Wulf’s men report encounters with the mysterious wraith, a part of the film that works so well in anime that you can’t imagine it in live action.
All the same, anime seems a strange way to go, even if, as the press handouts claim, that decision came before the choice of story. This is a Western production, with a Western voice cast (to whose voices the animation is perfectly synchronised), animated by a Japanese director and technicians. There are little moments in which characters acknowledge one another with the tiniest of bows, the way the Japanese (and other Orientals) do, in a film based around Western culture and myth, occasionally giving rise to a curious sense of cultural slippage.
Despite this odd state of affairs, director Kamiyama, a veteran of such anime TV series as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002-5) and Blade Runner: Black Lotus (2021-2), who also scripted Blood The Last Vampire (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 2000), seems in sync with his material. He gets fantastic performances out of an excellent voice cast, and the whole is beautifully paced and designed. However, the aforementioned jerkiness of the animation in the wider vista scenes lets it down. With Jackson’s live action LOTR films being as good as they are, that’s quite a drawback. Overall, though, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, December 13th.
Trailer: