The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

What can you do when you have Lord of the Rings, having a crossover with anime cinema, and exploring a new era in its universe?

This new Lord of the Rings movie is still, in some ways, an adventurous movie: it's exciting, colorful, tense, and engaging. Sola Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation provides a colorful, adventurous design and presentation there with some well-constructed character designs and battle sequences. Many of the sound designs and action sequences are bright and tense, for LOTR's thrill standards, it still sells out what the world is like. The world J. R. R. Tolkien has created is large and ambitious, there are many approaches and styles that can be explored to see many different aspects about their world and setting.

However, instead of making a wonderful and classic narrative and world of what made Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring approach. War of the Rohirrim is the definition of a beautiful mess, a mess that still both impresses and fails to impress me at the same time. It suffers from what both modern Anime cinema and Hollywood suffers. Crafted with static colorful animation, ambitious concepts, and great action sequences, but phoned in with the cliche bad aspects of character development and engagement, uneven writing, and phoning the tiresome anime tropes that run the well dry. It lacks what made Jackson's LOTR amazing, because unlike Jackson's approach, many of the characters are not interesting and you don't connect nor remember them on an emotional level. Almost as if it repeats some of the worst aspects about The Hobbit Trilogy.

It's a shame because the beautiful character designs and background are breathtaking, despite some use of poor CGI. The voice performances are all pretty good, alongside the musical score and thrill moments. With the concepts and world, things could have been approached pretty well. But for a LOTR narrative, it doesn't really feel like a LOTR story. You can name it anything else and I would have believed it was something new and different from LOTR.

But let me say this, nobody asked for anime and LOTR to become a thing. Yet it happened. I do applaud the studio and filmmakers to actually do it.