In the Flesh: The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

It takes a bold creative team to step into the world of Peter Jackson’s monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy, much less to do so with an animated film. Kenji Kamiyama’s War of the Rohirrim, unlike some other recent efforts I could name, earns its stripes and then some. From its loving animation, marred only by a few rushed effects, to its talented and committed voice cast, Kamiyama’s feature punches above its weight class at virtually every turn. It textures moments from Jackson’s films, such as the iconic cry of “Death! Death!” before the charge of the Rohirrim in Return of the King, by recontextualizing these touchstones of Rohan’s culture in less flattering lights, and mines real beauty and disgust from its embittered incel antagonist, Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), and his obsession with his childhood friend, the king’s daughter Héra (Gaia Wise). 

Of particular note is the film’s action, which is almost entirely perfectly paced and weighted, no mean feat in an animated medium. The sense of terror before each sword stroke and arrow’s flight, the grisly toll of each impact, it all creates a sense of omnipresent danger that makes the film’s battles and duels riveting. At any moment, everything could come apart into disaster, as when a rabid oliphaunt surprises Héra and her companions in the hills outside Edoras. The beast is nightmarish, covered in open wounds, frothing at the mouth, crashing through trees without hesitation. There’s a real feeling that this creature could kill half the cast, and when Héra peels it off by cleverly seizing and sounding its slain master’s horn, that indiscriminate violence narrows to a laser point before the film pulls an old friend out of its sleeve to send things in an even nastier direction.

There are a few slightly awkward beats in the second act, but it’s easy to overlook these comparatively minor failings when you get stuff like Héra riding out to meet her one-time suitor in a ruined wedding gown and answering his question as to the name of her intended with a forceful, “Death.” Their final fight is a barn-burner, Wulf shamefully betraying his oath again and again, Héra held back by nobility until no choice remains but to put down another rabid animal. War of the Rohirrim is a small story, and it knows its scale and stakes with enough confidence to avoid dipping too often into the well of Jackson’s trilogy, content to carve a little space out for itself on the margins of a much larger and wilder world. It’s great to see such passion brought to bear on a story more in line with Sword of the Stranger than Lord of the Rings. That’s how you get gems like this.

DISCLAIMER: Jason DeMarco, one of the film’s producers, is a personal friend of mine, but this has not influenced my past reviews, not always favorable, of work with which he has been involved, and did not influence this review.