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Join Telegram ChannelA sexy and flamboyant animated adventure in Middle-earth, but which remains too subservient to Peter Jackson's trilogy to stand on its own two feet.
This may well be the good geek idea of the year: shooting a spin-off of Lord of the Rings way anime. An exciting idea, if not totally original. In 1998, Hisao Tamaki drew a funny, and entirely appropriate, adaptation of Star Wars in manga, and the anthology series Star Wars Visions left a good place for Japanese authors. In any case, the idea carries with it a great cinematic promise: repainting Tolkien in the colors of Japanese animation. Basically, whether the film reveals to us the origin of the name of Helm's Deep, two centuries before the War of the Ring, we don't really care. To put it more simply: the lorewe don't care, but style is everything. That’s good, like, The Rohirrim War has it in spades.
We are therefore among the Rohirrim, at the heart of a King Lear-style intrigue between different clans. Hera, the daughter of King Helm, must protect her people from the warlike aims of Wulf, son of a Dúnedain lord killed by Helm. Legacies and ancestral violence that will be resolved with blows of siege to the face. Good viking pornin short, which would certainly not have been out of place on Netflix between Castlevania And Twilight of the Gods by Snyder. Except that we are in the cinema, that the story takes place on the big screen, and that the director is the great Kenji Kamiyama. Until now, his greatest achievement was the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complexwhich brilliantly took up the torch of the franchise by continuing the radical experiments carried out by Mamoru Oshii on Masamune Shirow's comics. The very beautiful adventure film Hirune Hime, daydreams (2017) allowed Kamiyama to step out of the Shirow/Oshii universe for a moment, and showed that he had the makings of an author.
In comparison, despite its beauty, pace and effort, The Rohirrim War takes more of the order work. Because the style Middle Earth crushes everything: the narration is provided by Miranda Otto, the music of Rohan is there, Philippa Boyens (screenwriter of Jackson) and Fran Walsh produce, entire shots are copied from films like the charge of the horsemen straight out of the end of the Two rounds… The heroine even climbs a snowy wall, almost exactly like Galadriel in the first episode of Season 1 of Rings of Powerr. Faced with such a demonstration of transmedia professionalism in terms of IP, we remember the Lord of the Rings (1978) by Ralph Bakshi, which thus always retains its singular imperfection in the vast lineage of Tolkien adaptations.
The industrial challenge is obvious: it is a question of continuing to keep alive the aesthetic and narrative heritage of Peter Jackson's trilogy, to the point of absurdity. The proof is the presence in the credits of Christopher Lee, who died in 2015, six years before the start of this project. The Rohirrim Waras The Rings of Powerseems to assert that the vision of the cinema trilogy is the only valid one to bring Tolkien's imagination to life. The next planned film, The Hunt for Gollumshould see Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen return, in a story supposed to take place in parallel with The Fellowship of the Ring…while the actors will be twenty-five years older than at the time. It's definitely easier to repeat than to create, but it's even easier to make repetition a rule. Thus Jude Law revealed that the specifications of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew banned certain camera movements, on the grounds that they were not possible in 1977.
When will there be new Saruman, new Rohirrim, a new Middle Earth? It won't be this time. And it's a shame, because the film manages to transform the vintage Rohirrim into sexy creatures, competing for charisma, during flamboyant and romantic duels that evoke the epic power of the Chronicles of the Lodosian Warto name only the most obvious and influential of anime of fantasy. We prefer to think that we will remember The War of the Rohirrim for its vision of the Eagles (terrible, almost divine colossi) or of Helm's last fight in the snow: maddening flights, where the appearance evokes myth, and where The Rohirrim War finds a real reason for being. Certainly not in servitude to “the unbearable weight of Middle Earth” (Lord of the Ringsbook V, chapter 3).