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There are two kinds of Lord of the Rings fans. Those who have seen the Rankin and Bass version of The Return of the King, and everybody else. It’s okay. I get it. Peter Jackson delivered a near-perfect version of Return of the King in 2003, so, why would you watch the 1980 animated version, complete with singing orcs who are complaining about getting whipped all the time? Yes, most serious Tolkien-heads have seen the classic 1977 Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit, but it’s in the beautiful strangeness of the 1980 Return of the King that the best and weirdest aspects of Middle-earth can truly be understood.
And, believe it or not, the flashy new anime film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, has more in common with the Rankin/Bass animated Tolkien efforts than you might realize. Because while the film obviously honors the books of J.R.R. Tolkien and the films of Peter Jackson, which the film is technically in canon with, there’s deeper referential magic at work here. Mild spoilers ahead.
First of all, although the idea of a Lord of the Rings anime film seems fairly new, it’s in this concept that we find the first connection between The War of the Rohirrim and the two animated Rankin/Bass Tolkien films of the past. In fact, though produced by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, with a screenplay from Romeo Muller, the actual animation for the 1977 Hobbit was completed by a Tokyo-based animation studio called Topcraft.
By 1985, when Topcraft shut down, its animators largely went on to work for Studio Ghibli. So, in a sense, the first several animated LOTR movies ever, including The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1982), and The Return of the King (1980), were created by an anime studio. The mere existence of War of the Rohirrim and the fact that it’s animated by Sola Entertainment in Japan, and directed by well-known anime filmmaker Kenji Kamiyama, means that on some level this is a return to the earliest tradition of Middle-earth movies.
On top of that, The War of the Rohirrim features two unique shoutouts to the aesthetics and narrative choices of the Rankin and Bass animated movies, and very specifically, the 1980 version of Return of the King. Early in The War of the Rohirrim we get some minstrel music action, giving us the feeling that we’re hearing a tale from deep in the past, or as Miranda Otto’s narration tells us, the story of a heroic shield-maiden whose name isn’t found in the “old songs.”
But the telltale folk-y minstrel music should transport certain types of Tolkien fans right back to the Rankin /ass movies. The 1977 Hobbit very famously relies on the Glenn Yarbrough folk song “The Greatest Adventure,” which can be heard throughout the movie. Meanwhile the 1980 Return of the King more liberally asserts an actual minstrel character into the narrative frame of the movie. At some fictitious future-tense birthday for Bilbo, beyond the events of The Lord of the Rings, the Minstrel (again, Glenn Yarbrough) sings a ballad called “Frodo of the Nine Fingers,” which aims to explain to the slightly forgetful Bilbo about why Frodo only has nine fingers now—because of everything that happened with Gollum, you know, biting one of those fingers off.
This is all hilarious as it sounds, but the charm of the animated Return of the King is that this goofiness is for the most part played entirely straight. As artistic adaptations of The Hobbit and The Return of the King, these films simply decided to lean on the folky-minstrel thing, which means the allusions to similar music in The War of the Rohirrim can’t be an accident.
If you remain unconvinced that The War of the Rohirrim is specifically linked to the animated Tolkien films of the past, there’s another smoking pinecone of evidence. Although the War of the Ring is still roughly 200 years in the future from the events in the new 2024 anime movie, there are a few overt references to those events still sprinkled throughout Rohirrim. This includes a near-the-end appearance of Saruman (voiced by the late Christopher Lee) taking over as the new master of Isengard. But there’s one moment that’s an even bigger reference.
At one point, in the aftermath of one of the attacks from the wraith-ish Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox), we see two orcs gathering random rings from fallen soldiers. These orcs are nervous and frustrated, and among themselves, wonder why Sauron, their master, wants so many rings collected.
Book readers know that this is the moment in time where Sauron is trying to trackdown all the rings he helped create, and also, of course, is in search of the One Ring, which at this point is missing. But it’s the behavior of these orcs in this scene that is most evocative of the 1980 Return of the King. Neither ruthless nor fierce, these two orcs are skittish, and frustrated. This recalls the Orc marching song from the animated Return of the King, “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way.” In that song, some of the orcs sing, “We don’t want to go to war today,” indicating that not all orcs were really excited about Sauron’s dark deeds, but simply had no other choice. (The Rings of Power gestured at these more well-rounded orcs recently as well.)
The way the orcs behave in this scene, and even appear, feels closer to the Rankin/Bass animated Orcs than the Peter Jackson orcs. This is a refreshing deep-cut within The War of the Rohirrim. Because as serious and epic as that movie is, the off-kilter orcs are a reminder that The Lord of the Rings franchise doesn’t always have to be fully earnest. In Middle-earth, you can have a little fun too.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is in theaters now.
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