The Creative Forces Behind ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Reveal the Lore of Their New Take on Tolkien

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‘As you bring it more and more into realism, it kind of becomes boring If you try to basically imitate the realistic movements.’

— Director Kenji Kamiyama

 

 

 

In the time since The Return of the King bid farewell to Frodo, there have been a number of attempts to prolong the life of the (middle) earth-shaking Lord of the Rings franchise: Take, for example, The Hobbit and Prime Video’s very expensive Rings of Power series. Perhaps, then, the anime prequel film The War of the Rohirrim begins at an advantage by consciously moving away from that same narrative space. It’s still familiar — there are places, people and creatures even casual fans will recognize — but the film’s creative leads aren’t trying to rebottle lightning.

Maybe they never were: As Philippa Boyens, the co-writer of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy and a producer on The War of the Rohirrim tells Animation Magazine, “For some reason I seem to come back to Middle-earth every 12 years or so, not on purpose. This one has been really like dipping our toes back in the water and, of course, was something completely different this time.” Boyens expresses dual feelings of excitement and anxiousness at working in the unfamiliar rhythms of a new medium. “I was a little bit more unsure about animation being the way to go. Turns out it was perfect, not least because of the director that we are working with,” she says.

War and Punishment

“I think the biggest adjustment is how thoroughly you need to be on top of everything — once you have committed to something, you are seriously committing to that piece of storytelling,” Boyens adds. Learning where adjustments could be made was a major part of what Boyens referred to as “the dance of animation.”

This learning curve aside, she felt animation was the perfect medium for the themes they wanted to explore and a story that asks, “At what point will reason overcome the insanity?” She explains that it’s about an idea of war as disproportionate punishment. “Our antagonist, Wulf, literally turns on his main general and says, ‘You think I want to be here?’ He literally can’t let go of this. He can’t let go of the siege or the will to conquer these people and destroy them, even though it would be the wiser course and he’s already won,” she says.

‘In the appendices where the story is drawn from, we get these quite interestingly drawn male characters, and then we get this young female character who is never named — and that was really interesting to me.’

— Producer Philippa Boyens

 

 

That rather serious theme is, of course, reflected in the team’s visual approach. Speaking to director Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and producer Joseph Chou (Blade Runner: Black Out 2022), who spoke on his own behalf and also acted as Kamiyama’s interpreter, the two highlighted how they leaned away from a stylization of action they saw as closely associated with anime and made it less heroic.

“As you bring it more and more into realism, it kind of becomes boring if you try to basically imitate the realistic movements,” Kamiyama says. “But he wanted to bring it to that point, in the battle sequences where people are dying, because it needed to be real, it needed to convey that it’s not a fun thing to kill people.”

Besides finding the film’s perspective in the protagonist Hèra, the team also had to find a look that not only felt new but fit into the aesthetics of the world established by Peter Jackson’s films.

Some of that work was aided by the archives of materials used in the original films. Kamiyama mentions the assistance of the Lord of the Rings concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe. Chou spoke about it practically. “In a way, that was a huge help in trying to visualize this. We’re not going to try to top the live-action version, because the level of detail and information isn’t quite there. But because we have not only the resources from the past films but also the folks who actually worked on that world, it was great to merge that with the art team in Japan to try to create together what that might look like.”

This even extended to the film’s sound design, with open access to the sound library and the team who worked on all the films. “So the sound team actually was just coming off of Avatar [The Way of Water] and Dune: Part Two. But they all worked on the original six films,” says Chou. “Sound is one area I think a lot of Japanese directors are quite frustrated about [laughs]; it tends to be a bit of an afterthought. It was very exciting to work with world-class sound designers. I think a lot of Trilogy fans will also recognize something that will put some smiles on their face when they hear it.”

As much as it may seem to the rest of the world that anime is in a boom period, Kamiyama and Chou spoke candidly about the pressures of the industry. When asked why the production team used motion capture and Unreal Engine for planning shots, the answer came down to the fact that they were against the clock — more than usual, anyway.

“The amount of time that was given to us is No. 1; typically, Hollywood film cycles are different from Japanese productions,” says Chou. He quips, “Something of this scale, if it’s hand-drawn, it’ll take 500 years!”

He continues to expand on how the state of the Japanese animation industry affected them, saying that they’re suffering from a scarcity of talent. “You only have so many animators for so many titles, and on top of it, there’s an unprecedented demand for anime. So you just add all that together, and you’re thinking, ‘How do we do this?’ And [when] we were working on the script, we thought, ‘Oh, this’ll be 90 minutes, no problem.’” A quick pause from Chou. “It became two hours and 40 minutes.

“We cut it down,” he clarifies, “but it’s Lord of the Rings, [so] you have to have a battle, and there are 2,000 horses moving on screen. So, it’s just a physical requirement that we have to figure this out somehow.” Kamiyama explains how they used the software: “Once the assets were built to scale, it would be put into Unreal, and I would then decide the layout, camera angles, lens — everything. We would test everything and make those choices, and then we would have a cut. And so that’s done through motion capture with the rough assets, and then I would decide what we’d use.”

It wasn’t a catchall solution, and Kamiyama wanted to keep CG animation to a relative minimum, using it only for adding realism to smaller movements “like somebody who’s getting on a horse, somebody who’s taking something and putting it in their pocket.” Outside of that, it was used as a guide for the international teams of animators: “I needed a definitive guide that I could provide to them,” he remarks. They avoided tracing, instead asking the animators to interpret. “I like to say I made the film three times,” he adds.

Chou explains that this first pass at scenes in Unreal Engine and using CG animation served the same purpose as live-action references. “Normally speaking, animators would have to study [real] people doing it and then re-create that. But we didn’t have time for that because we were working with some 60-plus companies around the world to try to get the film done.”

When it came to sending off the CG animation to these international studios for artists to redraw in traditional 2D, there was a lot of trial and error. “I would say, ‘Don’t trace,’ and they would trace it,” Kamiyama recalls. “And then it would have this robotic CG movement.” Since the goal was to make the animation feel more natural, interpretation was what the director wanted, rather than a direct redraw.

All Is Fair in War

Our conversation around CG animation and how it saved on production time led back to a topic affecting the anime industry as a whole: a shortage of artists. Chou says that despite the fact that the demand for anime is higher than ever, both in Japan and internationally, there are simply not enough people available to do the work. One area this affected War of the Rohirrim was with corrections. Chou says that, typically, for checking the consistency of cuts on a production such as this, he would hope for around 40 or 50 people in-house. They had two.

Chou makes sure to underline that he means they only had two people “in-house” specifically, as their international partners would pick up the slack. “So, we have two in-house animation directors. And so basically almost every single shot [Kamiyama] had to look over. Normally, you would have guys who would help him, but he literally had to check every shot and send out the retakes, and you would have to be very careful how to assign that to these two in-house people, because they are the best, so if you want to fix shots, that’s where you go.”

Considering the scale of the film, that’s probably a lot of deliberation. Chou reflects, “We’ve never done a project this hard. But I guess that’s kind of a rite of passage for a Lord of the Rings film.”

 

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Warner Bros. releases The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in theaters on December 11 internationally and on December 13 in the U.S.