The rationale for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is not in its artistry. Sure, there’s something lovely and almost tactile in this anime take on JRR Tolkien, the hand-drawn Japanese styles renovating Middle-earth to suit its tastes. That’s not justification enough to sit through a plodding and joyless spin-off, the latest in content mined from Tolkien’s books following Peter Jackson’s Rings and The Hobbit trilogies and an Amazon prequel series now in its second season.
For those already battling Tolkien fatigue, brace yourselves for a new batch of movies beginning with Andy Serkis’s The Hunt for Gollum. This is just where limitless IP plundering intersecting with the limited imagination in an industry chasing algorithms has gotten us. And by that math, luring the demographic that’s making anime much more popular now than ever (with Demon Slayer slaying on streamers and the box office, even during the pandemic) sounds like a bankable gambit.
