Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.On TV and in film, series prequels continue to be very much in vogue. Whether touting prehistories of Star Wars, Dune or Game of Thrones, these spin-offs may bear little resemblance to the beloved originals. But it suffices to carry a familiar franchise title and declare that the action takes place a few centuries or millennia before the main saga, and you can count on attracting a loyal, curious audience.Following Amazon’s series The Rings of Power, here is a new Tolkien derivative: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a lumbering anime directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Narratively, it bears tenuous relation to Peter Jackson’s phenomenally successful Middle Earth cycle — apart from a couple of outrageously knowing winks in the coda, which briefly samples the voice of a revered Lord of the Rings actor. But the film bears the legend “Peter Jackson presents” (he is executive producer), which should in itself do the trick at the box office.To non-initiates, The War of the Rohirrim may sound like a face-off between competitive throat-clearing teams; in fact, we’re dealing with the people of Rohan, led by Odin-like chieftain Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox), a booming bruiser whose ire starts a war with a rival clan. Besieged in a mountain fortress, Helm’s people would face certain doom, if not for Helm’s young daughter Héra, who we are told is a “wild . . . headstrong . . . tearaway child” (or, as the ancient chronicles would surely have it, “kicke-asse”).The characters, executed in clean-lined 2D, are lifeless, oddly stiff in their movements. Héra’s face has the generic flat, big-eyed anime look, not rendered much more expressive by Gaia Wise’s voice performance, with its impassive posh-girl monotone. The backgrounds, at least, are worth looking at. They have the imposing sweep of highly textured video-game art, with a strong flavour of northern European/Asian cross-pollination — a touch of Celtic Kurosawa.★★☆☆☆In cinemas from December 13
