Amazon’s TV series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” has already learned that it can be risky to delve into the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novels and put on screen in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film trilogy. In fact, Jackson himself learned that when he followed his “Lord of the Rings” films with the three overstuffed and significantly less appreciated “Hobbit” movies.
But now the makers of the animated film “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” are taking on an even more daunting challenge: They’re not only building a story only glancingly mentioned in Tolkien’s legendarium, but they’re doing so using the medium of anime, a distinctly different form from the CG-heavy live-action world that Jackson created.