By 
This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
Nobody could forget the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the doomed bloodbath that became a surprise victory in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. But who remembers the king who gave the setting its name?
King Helm Hammerhand was a legendary ruler of the horse-loving kingdom of Rohan, whose story was outlined briefly in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings. This December’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim casts Succession’s Brian Cox as King Helm’s voice and tells his tale through the eyes of his daughter, Hèra (Gaia Wise), who must fight to defend her people after a diplomatic meeting goes seriously wrong.
For writer and producer Philippa Boyens, it was an exciting chance to tell a new story set in Tolkien’s world. “We could bring some fresh characters to the storytelling that fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come across before,” Boyens tells Den of Geek magazine when we chat via Zoom, “and delve into their stories. Even though it’s quite a gritty story, [director Kenji] Kamiyama was not afraid, because he’s a storyteller. The story gets very claustrophobic; you think you’re in one tale, and then it becomes something quite different. And it comes down to these very human emotions of obsession and love that have turned to hate.”
We’ve seen Tolkien’s Middle-earth in animated form before, but this will be the first time that we see it transformed into Japanese anime. “We’d been looking at animated films,” Boyens explains, “and we said, ‘What about anime?’ I thought, ‘There is a story that could work really well.’ There’s something about the Rohirrim that speaks to that great tradition of Japanese storytelling.”
The new film is very clearly and intentionally set in the same version of Tolkien’s world as the two epic film trilogies Boyens co-wrote and co-produced with Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, and the style of Japanese anime was a particularly good fit for that. “Great Japanese films can touch on the fantastical,” Boyens says, “but they also [have] an otherworldly quality without losing any feeling of realness and grittiness. There’s a magical quality to it that elevates it. It also allowed us to bring Kenji Kamiyama to the world of it. And he’s such a masterful director.”
Kamiyama has an extensive background in anime television shows, including Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Star Wars: Visions. For him, Jackson’s films were the key to entering Tolkien’s world. The book was “such a dense translation into Japanese,” he tells us. But Jackson’s films made him “realize what kind of story this was.” So he delved back into the text and became a huge fan, appreciating the work that Tolkien put into building his universe.
The design of the film clearly references Jackson’s trilogies while also putting its own stamp on the material. “We were given open access to everything they had,” Kamiyama says. “The concept artists John Howe and Alan Lee also came on board. But at the same time, it had to be redesigned [in a way] that fits into the world of animation.” The aim was to keep the lines of the live-action films’ designs while also creating beautiful artwork that would fit into an anime production.
The process of creating an animated film is, of course, quite different from filmmaking in live-action. For Brian Cox, playing Helm Hammerhand was a welcome return to radio acting.
“I’m a passionate lover of the radio,” he tells us, “I love radio acting. I love it for selfish reasons. You don’t have to wear makeup, you don’t have to wear costumes, but it’s all about the script and your relationship to that script.” He also worked closely with Boyens, who “was incredible and really helpful, and she gave me a lot of free rein in the role.”
For Gaia Wise and Luke Pasqualino, playing Hèra and Dunlending prince Wulf respectively, the process was surprisingly physical. “When you read ‘fight noises’ on a page,” Wise says, “you go, ‘Can you elaborate slightly? The first time I did it, I had a tiny sword and a tiny shield in the booth, and I was pretending I was stabbing. But you can’t make the motion fully because [the microphone] can pick up the click of your shoulder. And then towards the end, when we were in the larger rooms, I was jumping about and running around, and getting on and off horses was just a lot of me climbing off of chairs.”
Pasqualino had the benefit of some prior sword-fighting experience to draw on in the BBC’s The Musketeers. “I think I did draw on my Musketeers experience for a little bit of fight stuff, but it’s never quite the same,” he says. “And then as the animation side of it developed, we actually could see the fight scenes, and you have to hone it a little bit and tweak it, but it was nice to have that experience up here somewhere and draw upon it as and when needed.” The physical action may have been less strenuous, but according to Pasqualino, both actors still suffered for their art. “We both choked ourselves,” he says, “and I lost my voice. But it was the very final take of my very final recording. So at least that happened then and not before!”
With fight noises nailed, it was up to Kamiyama to create epic battle scenes to stand alongside their live-action counterparts. Much of the action of the movie takes place at Helm’s Deep, or more specifically, the Hornburg, the stronghold at the front of the canyon of Helm’s Deep; it was a source of great annoyance to Tolkien that people kept mixing them up. This was the site of one of the most epic and fondly remembered battle sequences in Jackson’s The Two Towers, so this adaptation has a lot to live up to.
“It was casually thrown around, [numbers] like 2,000 horses or 3,000 horses,” Kamiyama says. “But they had to move, and they don’t just move. They have to be in a battle. And then you have the intricacies of detail in terms of armor and then the clothes.” Kamiyama’s solution was to use a combination of techniques, including CG animation and motion capture, as well as traditional hand-drawn elements. “Human movements and horse movements were provided as a guide to the animators to hand draw it—not to trace it, but to interpret it. If you trace it, it becomes a rotoscope. Then it becomes a human movement, so you might as well do it as a live-action movie.”
Boyens is enthusiastic about the process of making an animated Lord of the Rings movie, and there may be more to come in the future. “I feel like I’ve fallen in love with animation,” she says. “There’s a ton of really brilliant stories that I think are left to be told, and some that are most perfectly suited to animation.”
In the meantime, though, The Hunt for Gollum is on! Peter Jackson is producing, and Andy Serkis is directing the next live-action film in the franchise, slated for a 2026 release. “The Hunt for Gollum is going brilliantly,” Boyens tells us. “I had forgotten how much story there is—he must be one of the most brilliant characters Tolkien ever wrote.”
As excited as we are to see the team behind the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy return to live-action, we’re also very happy to see the franchise branch out into new formats, and anime and Tolkien look like they are going to be a pretty good match.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim opens in theaters Dec. 13.
The post How Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Expands Tolkien’s Great Untold Story appeared first on Den of Geek.
