News: The War of the Rohirrim Anime Might be Slightly Better Than Rings of Power.

When I first heard that we were going to be getting a Lord of the Rings movie produced by some of the people who worked on the original movie, I was stoked. Of course, this was before I saw Rings of Power, realized that literally anything written by Tolkien would be destroyed nowadays, and then heard the news about a new movie centering around Gollum that should be coming out in 2026. I quickly put the news about the War of the Rohirrim movie in the back of my mind and forgot about it until the trailer came out last Friday. Now, I’m conflicted.

First of all, credit needs to be given where credit is due. Artistically, it looks great. I love the look of anime (when the characters don’t look like hookers) and seeing the world of Middle Earth be animated as though it could be found in a Studio Ghibli film makes me so happy. The animation looks beautiful and really sells the Middle Earth that we know and love (except for Hera’s “armor”, something I’ll get to in a second).

The music is also stellar, though the first part of it is just taken from the original movies, but I have no complaints about that since the Rohan theme absolutely smacks.

However, though the animation and music are good, the actual content of the trailer is questionable and has made me lower my expectations for this movie. The beginning scene has a ton of shots from the original movie which, though I thought that was kind of cheap, I could understand from the perspective of most people probably having no idea who Helm Hammerhand is. The next scenes that set up the story shows the Dunlending lord, Wulf, and his father, Freca, coming into Helm’s court demanding that hand of his daughter, Hera, in marriage, which is our first problem. On top of having no meaning in Rohirric, Old English, Norse or Welsh, she isn’t even named in the Appendices where the tale of the War of the Rohirrim is told. She is only mentioned in one sentence before the rest of the story focuses on Helm’s fight against the Dunlendings.

But when has that ever stopped modern Hollywood from replacing a much more capable and interesting male character with an uninteresting, often unlikeable girlboss?

From there, the trailer gets worse as Hera takes the stage as the leader in the fight against the Dunlendings because she refused Wulf’s hand in marriage (even though it was Helm who refused to give her to him in the original story), which, while understandable, is selfish in so many ways. Because Tolkien’s stories are based off of Medieval Europe and it’s cultures, Hera’s job would be to be wed to anyone her father wants her to be wed to so she can help secure the wellbeing of the people. Not doing so of her own accord as we see in the trailer shows her to be a selfish jerk. Then there’s the line that one character speaks that she now has to pull from the power of her warrior-woman ancestors (you’re kind of stepping on Eowyn’s toes there, don’t you think) and apparently, she should be feared by all of her much bigger male opponents.

This also leads me to criticize her “armor”, a.k.a. the leather body suit that looks like it should be in an anime about space adventurers instead of Lord of the Rings. I know this is probably piddly, but could you tell that this wast supposed to be LOTR and not something else? Couldn’t they have animated her to be wearing something like what we see Eowyn wearing in Return of the King when she rides into battle instead of something that looks objectively stupid? I can only guess that it’s for the audience of 14-year-old boys and that’s it.

Overall, while I do want to watch this movie, it looks like yet another bait and switch movie that should have been about a man that is integral to Tolkien’s history for the Rohirrim but was instead about a scrawny girl who no one cares about.

Until next time,

M.J.