We are in such a renaissance of animation these days. From CGI feats like ‘The Wild Robot‘ and ‘Across the Spider-Verse‘, to astonishing animes like ‘The Boy and the Heron‘ and ‘Suzume‘ there is truly an embassment of riches to be found. So I was quite hopeful when I found out that there was an animated Lord of the Rings film being released in theaters this year. Warner Bros. has, historically, fumbled every attempt at reigniting the once great Rings franchise, with the truly horrifyingly overstretched Hobbit films being the most notable case. I admittedly have not seen the Rings of Power Amazon Prime show, but judging solely on the degree it’s moved the cultural zeitgeist I expect there’s not the level of craft or care that Jackson’s original trilogy had.

Enter ‘Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim‘, a new film crafted by Japanese animation studio Sola Entertainment. The focus is on that of first battle of Helm’s Deep, or at least theoretically it is. A solid half of the film takes place outside the keep, in and around Edoras, the capital of Rohan, lead at this point by Helm Hammerhand, voiced by the mighty Brian Cox. Outside of Cox there’s not many big name actors, with the notable exception of Miranda Otto who acts as a narrator to open the film, much akin to Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel did in the original trilogy. But even as the Howard Shore score swells and we are shown the rolling hills of Rohan once again, the animation feels lacking right out of the gate. The motions of the characters feel stiff and lifeless. And even when the few action sequences unfold it feels like the production was rushed and there are cels missing from every sequence. It’s embarrassing to have the new Lord of the Rings have lesser animation than an episode of My Hero Academia.

The best sequence is early in the film when a few Rohirrim are attacked by an Oliphant. The character design is the most ably done feature of the film, and the Oliphant is one that it feels like the animators got to have a lot of fun with. But after this? Not only does the plot feel like it shifts down into first gear, but the look of the action sequences also feel less dynamic as the movie goes on. To call this movie ‘War of the Rohirrim’ feels like a great deal of false advertising. The bulk of it is a stalemate, as the denizens of Rohan hide in the keep, and their adversarys wait patiently outside of it.

There is one other major return to the voice cast. The late Christopher Lee reprises his role as Saruman at the very end of the film. With permission from (his now late) wife Gitte Lee, the production company used samples of his dialogue from the Hobbit movies to bring Saruman back to life. While this is decidedly better than using AI to recreate him, and you don’t need to use CGI to make a horrifying lifeless puppet like the most recent Alien did with Ian Holm, I still pause to wonder if this was really what we needed. ‘Rohirrim’ has a lot of fan service moments that wink directly at the camera. There’s a brief appearance of The Watcher in the Water, a couple of orcs are “collecting rings” for Sauron, theres’e even a very brief appearance by Gandalf the Grey. None of these move the story forward at all. They’re just there for people to point at the screen knowingly and pat themselves on the back for recognizing the flagrant showboating of a once great franchise.

So while the return of Christopher Lee may have been done in the most moral way possible, it still didn’t sit well with me. Perhaps if they had spent less time on doing whatever they could to connect this movie to the other genuinely great films we could have had something that felt fresh, new, and interesting. Instead we’re left with a stilted series of cels that neither hold a candle to the series they’re trying to add onto, nor any of the more recent animated successes of the past.

1.5/5