Although The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was released in early December, Japanese cinemas only started screening it today. I really really really like Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, and hearing that some of the staff have returned to help create this anime film, I had really high hopes. Which also meant that I was going to be really disappointed. After all, I worked extra hard these few days just to make sure I can finish my work ahead of schedule so that I can make time to go catch this movie.
I was greeted with this sight. Looks like I was the first to enter.
Until I realised that it wasn't really going to be that crowded...
When the movie started, I saw the main character Hera riding on a horse. Or rather, what appeared to be a horse... except the animation was so horrendous that I nearly burst out in laughter. You would have thought that a budget of USD 30 million would have been at least Demon Slayer quality. Instead, the animation was more like some B grade anime movie...
Okay, so the animation could be better... let's see how the story goes.
Helm Hammerhand was supposed to be a great king such that Helm's Deep was named in his honour. Instead, he was portrayed as a fool in the story. 🤦
And that was just one problem. The story had more holes than a net. I don't know if there was any character that acted with any kind of logic; the only way these characters were acting with any kind of logic would have been if they were all idiots. Why were Hera and Wulf childhood friends, yet Wulf said that they should not be seen together? Why would the Dunlending and Southron warriors stop attacking the Hornburg when they were told they could loot all the (nonexistent) gold inside?
I could list the holes, if only I remembered them. The story is so horrible, it failed to leave any impression or leave any mark in my memory.
And to top it off, the credit roll went on forever. It also showed why the animation was so terrible. There were too many different anime studios involved in the animation. In the end, there was no consistency. The horse at the start of the movie was horribly done, but you get decent horses at the end of the movie. Sometimes, characters can't walk properly. The movie had so many executive producers, I don't really know what they were executing.
For comparison, Director Shinkai Makoto usually takes three years to create a movie, from the initial story board until it is finally released in theatres. Some of the animation work gets outsourced to other animation studios. But not as many as this movie. This movie outsourced so much work, it felt like they were trying to involve the entire anime industry at the global level (more than 60 companies, according to Wikipedia).
Poor animation and poor writing. I won't even talk about direction and composition here because direction and composition can't be noticed under the poor animation and poor writing. The music probably wasn't that bad but without the visuals and story to match, even great film scoring would not have left an impression. I think there are better fan fiction works out there with stronger stories. And a ton of anime films with better animation done using half or maybe even a tenth of the budget of this movie. If you give Kyoto Animation this budget, they would have churned out 10 Violet Evergarden the Movie.
I even wanted to go watch this anime film in Japanese dub... but I guess I will save myself the suffering and put that time to better use.
Highly recommend this movie to anyone with money and time to burn, and just want a dark place to sleep for 2 hours.
TL;DR: The story lacks a story, the characters lack character, the animation lacks animation.
Afternote: Tolkien never gave a name to Helm's daughter, and if this is her story, then we know why: that name is not worth remembering. I think this movie was a very poor attempt at trying to come up with something to fulfill contractual terms to retain the rights to LotR movies. Kind of like an afterthought. "Oh no, we forgot all about this series. Let's quickly piece something together." If this is the mentality, it is unlikely that any future works from this team will ever have the loving attention given to the original trilogy in the early 2000s.
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