Japan catches up with the Middle-Earth anime that most of the world has already written off as a flop – AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond was there to see it.
Tokyo often feels a century or two ahead of the rest of the world (anachronisms like faxes notwithstanding.) And yet when I saw The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in a Tokyo cinema, the Saturday after Christmas, I could have slipped a few weeks into the past.
After all, I’d read a heap of reports about how the Middle-Earth anime was DOA, at least on the big screen. In its first two weeks in U.S. cinemas, it failed to earn $10 million. By the time it opened in Japan, it had already gone to digital in America.
To add insult, a Variety report suggested Rohirrim’s American producers only made the film as a licensing maneuver. On this account, it had never mattered if Rohirrim made money or not. New Line Cinema and its parent Warner Bros. just needed a Middle-Earth film - any Middle-Earth film - so they could retain the rights to make “real” Middle-Earth films down the line.
From a corporate perspective, Rohirrim could have been Middle-Earth’s answer to Fantastic Four. Not the terrible ‘noughties Four films with Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, but the unspeakable shoestring 1994 film, never commercially released, which was made purely to keep a license.
Except that animation fans know there’s an older precedent with a Tolkien cartoon. The place was Prague, the year was 1967, and the animator was the legendary, Oscar winner Gene Deitch. He spent nearly a year developing The Hobbit painstakingly as a feature film. Then he was forced to rush out a barely-animated 12-minute short in a couple of weeks flat.
It was so his paymaster, William L. Snyder of Rembrandt Films, could retain the rights to Tolkien’s works – then sell them back to Tolkien for a fortune. Deitch’s account is online here; he also wrote about the experience in his online book, “How to Succeed in Animation,” published on AWN. You can see the film here.
Now, Rohirrim was being treated in some press as almost as minor a Middle-Earth footnote as Deitch’s film.
So, it was strange for me to go to Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s central districts, following all these dismissive obits I’d read… and see Rohirrim treated as a major film. Not that major, true. I saw far less advertising for it than for Moana 2 or Mufasa. And yet, each of the three big multiplexes near the giant Shinjuku station were screening Rohirrim on two or three screens through the day, in English and Japanese-language versions.
And it was something to walk into a Family Mart convenience store and see a promotion for Rohirrim playing across three huge plasma screens above the cashiers. When I went to the multiplex screening itself – English with Japanese subs – around noon on the Saturday, the room was about three-quarters full. The audience seemed to be overwhelmingly Japanese people, and they didn’t look like hardcore Tolkies.
It may have been a laughably local blip – I haven’t seen any Japanese BO figures as of writing. But for me, it felt like an antidote to the repeated news drubbings about Rohirrim bombing.
Still, I’d read too much. I didn’t expect much from the film itself.
Decent, stirring and sound
Except… I quickly found myself enjoying it. It’s no classic and there are umpteen obvious ways it could have been better. But I thought it was an extremely decent, sometimes stirring, narratively sound fantasy adventure. I enjoyed it more than, for example, Masashi Ando’s sincere but inert The Deer King. It’s fair to call Rohirrim conservative, even anonymous on the director’s part. But those features have been part of New Line’s Middle-Earth films for the last quarter-century.
Unlike many franchise spinoffs, Rohirrim would be accessible if you came to it new. It’s the story of a heroic princess, her stubborn royal father, and – in the second half – a bitter winter siege of her people, caused not by a Dark Lord but by human greed. The story could be called a game of thrones, if the name wasn’t taken.
Also, unlike many franchise spinoffs, Rohirrim has a mercifully clear-cut, satisfying end. Indeed, the final fights are the most engaging in the film. Admittedly, the ending is slightly blurred by the last few minutes, which bring in Easter Egg references to other films (they’ve drawn backlash). But I found them tolerable by today’s standards.
True, many moments could have been better. Much of the film’s character drama feels infuriatingly under-powered, especially that between the warrior princess heroine, Hera, and the man who desires her, Wulf. Wulf is ostensibly the villain, although he’s more a wretch, a Kylo Ren. As for his toxic entitlement, Captain Marvel did it better (the Jude Law character.)
Still, I enjoyed the film’s broader story: a game not just of thrones but of endurance and fortitude. I was impressed by the staging of the early throne-room confrontations… only to be downcast by the clumsy framing of the battle with a Mumakil (fantasy elephant). The tusked creature deserved more visionary handling, especially after the live-action films reduced it to a videogame monster in affectless CG.
And yet, even that Rohirrim sequence ends with an arresting visual – one fantasy behemoth swallowing another whole. It’s the kind of perversely gratifying image that would have stayed with me if I’d seen it as a child; instead, I’m of the generation haunted by the Black Riders in Ralph Bakshi’s version.
Of the characters, I was charmed by the less presumptuous figures. There’s the kick-ass maid tending to her warrior princess like a middle-aged Avenger, and a shy male servant who’s in impossible, Sam Gamgee-ish, love with his lady. There’s also a crone who’s set up like the mad clucking woman from old Frankenstein films, before that stereotype gets blithely overturned.
Indeed, one surely accidental irony of Rohirrim is that the script, by non-Japanese writers, subverts two ubiquitous clichés of commercial anime. Most obviously, Hera’s and Wulf’s story twists the idea of a childhood friendship that blossoms into romance. The script also sets up and then rejects the idea of a character transformed by their own rage and power, warped into a monster. It’s hardly an anime-only idea, but it’s been long envisioned by that medium with gusto.
True, one can wish Rohirrim’s visuals had more gusto themselves. The film is largely set in handsome but stony backdrops. The characters’ expressions and acting often take second place to their staging, like so much anime. Some of the complaints I’ve seen against Rohirrim’s framerate seem little different from the gibes at Ghibli’s “herky-jerky” movements from 30 years ago. But the film could certainly have used more spark.
In one scene, a character scales a cliff to reach a giant eagle. It’s good enough, you feel pleasure watching it, but it never ignites. One need only compare the eagle scene in Disney’s Rescuers Down Under to picture what it could have been like, Disney smoothness or no. The irony: Disney’s scene was inspired by anime.
For anyone seeking a Middle-Earth suited to far-out animation, look no further than director John Boorman’s infamously trippy script treatment of Lord of the Rings in the 1970s. It was intended for live-action, but it’s a cartoon through and through. A sample: “Suddenly (the hobbits) are in a field of buttercups. Naked children run and play among the golden flowers… (The hobbits) run over a hill and into a flock of sheep, which opens up to let them through and closes behind them again…”
Of course, Boorman’s film could only have been made in the 1970s.
A provisional post-mortem
But it might still beat Rohirrim today. For all my enjoyment of the film, it’s been poorly reviewed, and of course, poorly attended. As someone who liked it, I’m ill-placed to say why it failed. However, some observations are obvious.
Rohirrim is an extremely humorless, self-serious film, which may still spell death to animated films in the West. True, a recent anime import broke that rule on a modest scale. The tonally peculiar The Boy and the Heron had very little humor for its first hour, and it still earned around $46 million in America. But Boy and the Heron had the Miyazaki name, which counts for more in animation than Middle-Earth’s.
Moreover, Rohirrim lacks a feature of other Middle-Earth films. There’s no epic journey across a range of environments. As a character in the film complains, Rohirrim is about people getting stuck in a frozen valley, in a months-long siege. It’s valid dramatically, and true to Tolkien – there are two sieges in Lord of the Rings. But viewers may have wanted more New Zealand-derived majesty, less snow and dark.
For what it’s worth, anime has long dispensed with the notion that “fantasy” equals a scenic journey. Spirited Away took place mostly in one building. A more extreme case is the second TV season of Re:Zero. This is a 10-hour time-looping fantasy adventure that takes place in one magic-sealed wood and one mansion… which gets away with it, considering the show’s still going.
Going back to Rohirrim, there’s a further possibility. Did the film blunder by introducing all-new characters, barring cameos? Perhaps an animated Middle-Earth could have gotten more viewers on board by bringing back the characters fans loved, with their original voices where possible. That happened with a spinoff I covered last column, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off by Japan’s Science SARU, which brought back umpteen actors from the live-action film.
Might a Middle-Earth animation voiced by Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen and others have earned far more than Rohirrim? The trouble is such a cast might have cost far more than Rohirrim did too. The film was budgeted at $30 million, according to Variety. Readers may know that’s huge for anime, peanuts for Hollywood.
Still, if the famed LOTR cast could have been assembled for a low price, that invites further playful speculation. Many of the original characters’ stories were fully told in the live-action films. How could you take them on more adventures? But Scott Pilgrim Takes Off points the way again. That anime was a “what-if,” taking the characters to an alternate timeline and opening up new possibilities.
If New Line still wanted a story focused on a heroine, here’s one idea. In Tolkien’s original Lord of the Rings, the human hero Aragorn is in love with the elf Arwen. However, she’s barely glimpsed on the page. On screen, Arwen was played by Liv Tyler. The live-action films strove to expand her role, but with unsatisfying results, as they were still confined by Tolkien’s novel.
My modest suggestion: an animated reworking of Lord of the Rings where Arwen became a member of the nine-strong Fellowship of the Ring, travelling beside Aragorn, the man she loves. (Boromir could be knocked out of the Fellowship, playing its adversary.) Arwen and Aragorn could be far more central to the reworked saga, as it veers in directions far outside the novel, a What If…? to rival Marvel’s.
Well, it’s a thought.
Final notes
Even some anime fans don’t know War of the Rohirrim is far from the first animation of a Tolkien property to be drawn in Japan. Its precursors, though, aren’t usually counted as anime, being made as below-the-line work for America. They’re the TV cartoon versions of The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980), both released by Rankin/Bass. They were animated by Japan’s TopCraft studio, which went on to make Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. I wrote up that story for another website.
As I mentioned above, when it comes to the film’s director, Rohirrim has an anonymous-feeling quality that’s true of the franchise as a whole. However, the actual director is Kenji Kamiyama, who’s best known for reworking Ghost in the Shell for television (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex). For anyone wanting to know more about his personal, and often political, work, I profiled him in 2018.
