Middle-Earth Gets Animated in New ‘Lord of the Rings’ Trailer

The new Lord of the Rings movie is a bit of a throwback to the franchise’s pre-Peter Jackson days, with an animated film that takes place almost 200 years before the events chronicled in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (and J.R.R. Tolkien’s) trilogy.

Titled The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, the film features the voices of Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, and Luke Pasqualino and was directed by Kenji Kamiyama. (Jackson is involved as an executive producer.) The Cox’s character is the Helm of Helm’s Deep, and tells a story set in that location before it had that name. (One would assume this particular tale explains how it got that monicker.)

You can see the full trailer for the film, which is opening in theaters at the end of 2024, below:

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Decades before Jackson made his Lord of the Rings movies, Rankin and Bass produced multiple animated specials based on Tolkien’s work, including The Hobbit in 1977 and The Lord of the Rings in 1978. War of the Rohirrim is the first animated film in Warner Bros.’ Lord of the Rings franchise.

It’s arriving in theaters while a live-action Lord of the Rings TV series, The Rings of Power, is ongoing on Prime Video. (Warner Bros. has also announced plans for a new live-action Lord of the Rings movie called The Hunt for Gollum, which they intend to release in 2026.)

Here is the film’s official synopsis:

Set 183 years before the events chronicled in the original trilogy of films, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” tells the fate of the House of Helm Hammerhand, the legendary King of Rohan. A sudden attack by Wulf, a clever and ruthless Dunlending lord seeking vengeance for the death of his father, forces Helm and his people to make a daring last stand in the ancient stronghold of the Hornburg— a mighty fortress that will later come to be known as Helm’s Deep. Finding herself in an increasingly desperate situation, Héra, the daughter of Helm, must summon the will to lead the resistance against a deadly enemy intent on their total destruction.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is scheduled to open in theaters on December 13.