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This film may be called The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and this certainly does what it says on the tin, but I think I’m always going to know it by an alternate title that I couldn’t get out of my head while I was watching it. For me this is Rohirrim One: A Lord of the Rings Story.

Just like the 2016 Star Wars spin off, this expands on canonically but briefly referred to events that happen prior to the main established narrative, telling of key things that will play into what happens later. It also introduces an important female character that proves to be the unknown hero around which everything revolves, and dare I say this similarly attempts to balance out what had been a predominantly male centric story up until that point. The comparisons don’t stop there though. Just like Star Wars, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies have had their own inferior prequel trilogy and this new film is not set to be the only movie to explore other stories in this world with The Hunt for Gollum due out in 2026. This has a series of small screen adventures too although they are unaffiliated to Jackson’s version. Yep, all in all it feels like Lord of the Rings is going the same route that George Lucas’ little series of films recently have. Look out for The Book of Bombadil, coming soon.

The main difference between this and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is that The War of the Rohirrim is animated. This is clearly an area Star Wars has produced a lot of work in too but Lord of the Rings actually started on screen this way with Ralph Bakshi’s adaptation in 1978, just a year after we first met Luke Skywalker. There were a couple of feature length TV cartoons released around but separate to Bakahi’s movie as well, one of The Hobbit and one of The Return of the King. In terms of its on screen presence this world didn’t exist in any form other than animation until 2001. 

This is definitely Jackson’s Lord of the Rings though, even though that was live action. It comes from the same studio and shares the same producers. It is that version visually too, there is a brief return appearance from one character who looks and sounds like the actor who played him in the films and there are a number of very familiar locations with the exact same design. The story here is that of a battle for control of the human kingdom of Rohirrim that took place around two hundred years before Frodo defied expectations and simply walked into Mordor. The throne being contested here is that of King Helm Hammerhand and as you’d expect Helm’s Deep is one of those locations.

Unlike the other Lord of the Rings animations though, or indeed any of the a Star Wars ones, this is anime. The film is directed by established anime artist Kenji Kamiyama and it is his team doing the pen work. The writing and the money may be from America/New Zealand but the artistry is all Japanese. What we get is not up to the standard of Makoto Shinkai or Hayao Miyazaki but it does look great (even if the backgrounds and the people don’t always have matching styles). Kamiyama, it should be noted, also worked on Star Wars Visions which was the Galaxy Far Far Away’s one foray into anime. 

Narratively it feels a lot like Tolkien and Jackson together again too. As before the plot is driven by arrogant, power hungry, stubborn and misguided men but this just gives the new feminist protagonist more to stand up and out against. She is Héra (invented for this movie), the only daughter of Helm and proves to be a classic female warrior in the model of Mulan, Brienne of Tarth, Xena and of course Eowyn who she is very much a precursor to. In fact Miranda Otto reprises her role of Eowyn to act as narrator here. It has to be said it is good to see a Middle Earth story centred entirely around a woman. The Rings of Power show has a young Galadriel but she’s not the lead in the same way as Héra is here.

Above all else what any Lord of the Rings film needs to be is epic though and War of the Rohirrim manages this. You’ll definitely get swept up in this story of honour, legacy, loyalty, bravery and justice. You’ll get behind the heroes and detest the villains, booing and cheering as much as you did the last time we were all here. Even in this different medium it is good to back in the places where we’ve seen great adventures before and it mixes character and story nicely as both Tolkien and then Peter Jackson did. 

So if this is the start of a whole series of additional Lord of the Rings stories then it is a good start. Of course there is the risk that too many might dilute the quality of what we’ve had before, as it arguably has with Star Wars, but as Gandalf once said ‘even the wise cannot see all ends’. For now what we can see here is a good new beginning.