With the reveal of 20 minutes of footage from The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, we got our first look at Brian Cox’s Helm Hammerhand, an ancient King of Rohan. The movie takes place about 200 years before Bilbo first came to find the One Ring and the events of The Hobbit.
The animated film is directed by anime legend Kenji Kamiyama, and tells the story of the conflict between Rohan, a kingdom featured in the original movie trilogy, and the Dunleding. The war forces Helm and his kingdom to take refuge in a fortress that will eventually bear his name, Helm’s Deep.
‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ is an anime prequel film about an important battle in the history of Rohan. Producer Philippa Boyens, director Kenji Kamiyama, and voice actress Gaia Wise tease the film’s central characters. https://t.co/WpzWPEd5NR
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) June 11, 2024
Talking to People, producer Philippa Boyens–who also co-wrote the screenplays for each of the three Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit trilogy, talked about translating the world of Middle-earth to an anime style. “There are certain things I don’t think we could have necessarily done–or they would have made it extremely expensive–elements to the storytelling that you could do in anime in a way that was kind of breathtaking, actually.”
