The trailer for “War for Rohirrim” brings “Lord of the Rings” into the anime age

But the creative team behind The War for Rohirrim — which also features Adult Swim and Toonami creative director Jason DeMarco as a producer — has won out, and we’re getting a full-length animated Lord of the Rings movie this December. Good news: The first trailer for the film looks great.

Based on JRR Tolkien’s appendices to “The Lord of the Rings”, The War for Rohirrim

turns the clock back 200 years to Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, and his daughter Hèra as they take on an army of savage Dunlending brothers. Produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex), the finished product looks a little bit bigger than anything we got from the (in its own way good!) 1978 Lord of the ringswith all due respect to Ralph Bakshi.

This is just the beginning of a reboot of The Lord of the Rings from Warner Bros., which is likely under pressure from its corporate overlords to exploit this instrumental piece of intellectual property. As announced in May, Andy Serkis will once again direct and star in a new live-action Lord of the Rings film, again with Jackson’s approval (and key collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who worked on the screenplay).

But can The Lord of the Rings: The War for Rohirrim break through to the masses? Anime films are appearing in the top 10 of the US box office charts with increasing frequency, and the data suggests that audiences are ready to find a studio that can deliver adult animation on a scale. We’ll know whether Kamiyama and the team deliver when the film hits theaters on December 13.