Movie Review: A ‘Lord of the Rings’ tradition turns small-scale in the anime ‘Rohirrim’

By Jake Coyle

It’s a discombobulating experience, after a “Lord of the Rings” trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.”

The film, set 183 years before the events of “The Hobbit,” is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists.

“Rohirrim,” which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic universe extrapolation from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. (A live-action movie about Gollum is due out in 2026.) Here, the thin basis in Tolkien comes from the “Lord of the Rings” appendix, which lists a history of Rohan, the plains kingdom south of the Elven forest of Lothlórien.

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