Perhaps one of the buzziest event at the festival, the presentation for Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim stressed the scale of its undertaking — marrying the immense detail and western aesthetics of J.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series with the eastern aesthetics of anime, as director Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) put it. Produced by Jason DeMarco, SVP of Action and Anime at Warner Bros. Discovery and executive produced by Philippa Boyens, a co-writer on the original trilogy, the film is intended as standalone, a tragedy lost to time and separate from the Ring or Sauron.
Four Things We Learned:
The story is about the wreckage of war: The team were pretty happy to give away plot details – speaking candidly about its tragedy; it’s all in the texts after all. Boyens called War of the Rohirrim a story about “the wreckage of war.” She also teased the film’s front-heavy structure, in which “one of the biggest battles comes at the end of the first act… and then where do you go?” The answer was one that she said Kamiyama helped to shape, as it becomes a story about “supernatural grief” that becomes akin to a ghost story.
War of the Rohirrim will be seen through the eyes of a mostly unknown character: Though Helm Hammerhand, the creator of the fortress Helm’s Deep, will be a familiar one to Lord of the Rings fans, the film’s protagonist will be lesser known ‑ one who until this point is only called “Helm’s daughter” in Tolkien’s Appendices. One of the reasons why they chose Hera (voiced by Gaia Wise) for the film’s subjective perspective was a pragmatic one: “everyone else dies,” Boyens says. But also because they felt Hera was a more interesting figure to follow through a feudal, patriarchal warrior culture, and as a figure who only vaguely exists in the texts. With the character’s portrayal, the team stressed a combination of vulnerability and hardiness, and that they didn’t want her to be a “standard-issue warrior princess.”
They filled in the gaps by going back to what they interpreted as Tolkien’s own influences for the Rohan, in early Anglo Saxons. Hera herself is inspired by Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, a similarly buried figure in English history. Other characters were more defined by Tolkien’s text, such as the main antagonist Wulf — but the team still put their own visual spin on him: “he does pretty bad things, so he better be someone beautiful,” Kamiyama relating the feedback from his design team.
The film will return to several familiar locations from Peter Jackson’s trilogy: Set roughly 200 years prior, the team had to figure out how both create visual consistency with the film series while reimagining what these places would look like. To do so, they consulted Wētā Workshop, pulling old CG models of the locations from their archives as well as consulting with designer David Falconer. Also working on the film at a concept and design level are John Howe and Alan Lee, illustrator who worked as concept designers on Jackson’s original trilogy. When talking about the decision to make an anime production of Lord of the Rings, Boyens spoke of her desire for a more realistic style of animation, but also questioned simply slotting the characters we already knew into a new medium, so the team worked on a balance between visual consistency and creating something that felt unique. Helm himself feels like a visual basis for this on a character level, embracing a highly detailed art style with a bend towards realism.
Horses were among the team’s biggest challenges to animate: One of the biggest challenges came simply from the nature of the Rohan themselves as horse lords, and the sheer number that the team would have to draw, and “even just drawing one is…” Joseph Chou trailed off. To remedy this the animation crew was sent to a horse farm to “film it, experience it, be scared”, before using CG animation as placeholders, and Unreal Engine to simulate scenes and experiment with different camera angles, before using hand-drawn animation for the final result. Similar methods were used for human characters, using a combination of CG models, live action reference and real-time simulation for the animators to interpret (but not to rotoscope, they stressed).
Two exclusive clips showing rough animation were shown, to highlight showed how these methods worked in concert. The film leans into visual familiarity to start, with traditional Lord of the Rings voiceover and a shot of a weathered map, before moving into camerawork emulating Jackson’s sense of scale and reverence for mountainous landscape as Hera rides a horse through rocky hills. The second sequence was more subdued but also busy, full of characters talking in the halls of Edoras, with some of the aforementioned placeholders.
Kamiyama said that the project was one of his largest ever undertakings (and in the moment, as though to sympathize, the laptop showing the presentation on it displayed ‘low battery’). The resultant work seems full of visceral detail, the quick and intense promo that closed out the presentation laced with flashes of dismembered limbs and arrow wounds and, of course, plenty of hand-drawn horses.
Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim is currently in production and slated to be released theatrically on April 12, 2024.
