The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Being an animation this unfortunately won't get the love it deserves. Reminds me heavily of watching something like Nausicaa. I felt for the characters, it was beautiful and epic. A nice ride out into Tolkien's middle earth.

well, I thought it was going to be a bad movie as everyone else was saying but I was surprised that it was not. It was a decent movie. Really good soundtrack and an excellent storytelling and writing. I didn't like the animation so much. That gyroscope thing was too much for me. But besides that, it's 8.5 for me. I'm going with 9 because I loved LotR. It has the cliche thing about the villain being rejected and so on but I was okay with it.

Really liked it ,don’t watch much anime but definitely would consider now as I enjoyed this a lot ,the animation is great like the characters and story.

Love the lord of the rings this kinda has its own feel with a little bit of the lord of the rings aswell which is good.

Solid 9/10 dont know why the reviews are bad but not surprised these days.

Disregard the purist Lord of the Rings rabid fans. The movie is just fine, very good animation and voice acting. Some subtle ties to the movies, but it's its own story.

Surprisingly, I liked this. It is over-long, contains some spotty animation, and is filled to the brim with fantasy cliches. But it is also epic, contains beautiful backgrounds, and takes place in a lived-in world. I really enjoyed the art direction. Kamiyama provides good direction, and I like the casts’ performances. The worst thing? The suits clearly mandated some LOTR tie-ins, because they are so unneeded and ham-fisted — it took me out of the story that is actually being told.

I think it was good overall. The only thing I didn't like was the animation being done like this. I think it was done by drawing and speeding up the photos. I don't like this kind of animation at all. If they had done an animation like Arcane, I think it would have been much better. The movie is good in its current state. The Lord of the Rings is already a series of movies that I really like. I watched it breathlessly and without getting bored. As I said, the only thing I didn't like was the drawing animation, other than that it was very good.

Design is great. The manga style characters look good, and the decors even more. The animation is a bit lacking though. And there isn't that much to the story for something that long. Wulf being too caricatural a villain to be interesting doesn't help.

It is not clear where this war happens either. Did he conquer other places ? He took the crown, but no one else is working for him. He did nothing to actually become king. So what are all the others doing ? Just waiting to see what happens ? Weird.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a film caught between worlds – and you can feel that tension throughout. Branded as an anime, tied to the legendary Lord of the Rings canon, it tries to appeal to two very different audiences. The result is a project that succeeds atmospherically but struggles stylistically to find its footing.

The story centered on Helm Hammerhand and his daughter Héra is solid. The characters work – they’re written with clarity and fit well within the broader Middle-earth mythos. Héra, as the emotional and narrative anchor, carries her role convincingly without slipping into exaggerated tropes. Despite some online criticism about her being a forced "boss girl" character, I honestly didn’t see that at all. Her arc felt grounded and refreshingly understated.

What pulled me out of the experience, though, was the animation. On the surface, the production values are clearly there: detailed backgrounds, character designs that lean into a classic anime aesthetic. But the movement doesn’t match. The action scenes, the body language, even subtle gestures often feel odd. There's a disconnect between the visual style, which borrows from anime, and the motion, which feels heavily influenced by Western animation conventions.

You can tell the studio tried to merge the best of both worlds – Japanese visuals with a Western storytelling sensibility. But that ambition ends up limiting the result. Especially when you're hoping to get immersed in this dark, epic setting, the animation feels too restrained, too clean, too tight. The kind of emotional intensity and expressive looseness you expect from strong anime productions only shines through in rare moments.

Still, I wouldn’t call the film disappointing. It entertained me, the worldbuilding holds up, and there is a distinct Middle-earth feeling present – just never quite as strong as it could be. For open-minded fans, there’s enough here to stay curious. But it’s also a film that stumbles under the weight of its own ambitions – not amazing, not terrible, just somewhere in the middle. A compelling experiment, watchable, but not deeply memorable.

Not as bad as I thought, based on the comments I read..

I'll join the crowd in deploring the quality of the animation, which does not hold a candle to Ralph Bakshi's 1978 version or LOTR, though the backgrounds are certainly better.

The story in itself was, well, a side-story, remote from the original trilogy of even from Bilbo, or The Silmarillion (I would love to see a Silmarillion adaptation, animated or live action actually). But despite these misgivings the story was interesting enough,the voice acting good, and the pace rather good.

Taken by itself, it's quite a credible movie, though, the LOTR prefix is just that, a pretense to keep the IP rights in-house, the film makes a good job of entertaining the viewers, in a familiar setup.

If you're a fan of Tolkien's works i understand you might be disappointed in your expectations, it has none of the epic breadth of the original stories (which I've read and watched many times), but as a standalone story, it holds.