Ahead of the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim movie, Anime Corner had a chance to speak to the director of the animated feature, Kenji Kamiyama. Kamiyama, perhaps best known for his work on the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, previously spoke about his love for the LotR franchise and worry about doing this story justice. It’s important to note that the movie expands on the story of Helm Hammerhand and his (in the books unnamed) daughter while also being the first movie in the franchise with a female protagonist. How it came to be and who Héra is, we had the chance to ask.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It contains spoilers for the movie derived from Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Q: Could you tell us a bit more about getting involved with The War of Rohirrim animated project?
A: Initially what happened was that Jason DeMarco, who is with Warner Bros. Animation as one of the producers; I have actually worked with him on Blade Runner in the past, but he’s produced so many Japanese anime over the years and he approached me saying that he’d like to do the animated version of The Lord of the Rings. And if you wanted to do it in the Japanese style, what could we do? I kind of thought he was actually consulting with me. So that was the start of the project.
What I said at the time was: “It’d be very interesting to do that, to make an animation in a Lord of the Rings universe. It’s such an interesting challenge. But there are going to be so many obstacles and challenges on the way.” That’s what I said, but before you knew it, I became the director of this project.
Q: What would you say were the biggest challenges in turning this story into an animated format?
A: In the beginning, Peter Jackson had already done the animation for the fantasy part of the story, so I was wondering what I could do to make it more than just an animated version of the story. That was the biggest challenge for me at the time.
Because Peter Jackson has already visualized The Lord of the Rings series in a way of live-action format. In a way, the genre of the fantasy is that it can be really difficult to realize in a live-action, but he’s actually managed to do that. It’s already complete, such an amazing movie. The fantasy [genre] was actually very suitable for anime, that is the strength and advantage of the anime format, but he’s already done it in live-action. So in order to exceed that, in order to top that, what can we do? That’s something we had to kind of seek: thinking about the purpose and the reason why we needed to do this in anime format again.
But when I thought about it, the energy that you can create by using the hand drawing technique is something that has the potential to actually top even the live-action versions. So, for example, in order to make that happen, we need to overcome the obstacles, such as depicting the 2,000 riders clashing against the army of Dunlending, these kinds of battle sequences.
That is the challenge, to overcome that. But if you could do that, I was quite certain that we could make something that is even better than the live-action movie. Of course, these scenes are very difficult to [do] using the hand-drawn technique, so we were kind of trying to find out what we could do in order to overcome this kind of obstacle.
Q: This is the first time that The Lord of the Rings franchise has a female protagonist. Was there something different about approaching the story this time around?
Speaking of [female characters], as you say, it is very rare that in the Lord of the Rings [movie] universe that there are female characters [who are] featured and the same goes for Tolkien’s original book, [they are] not really featured as well either.
When we decided to make a film based on the story of Helm Hammerhand, we all agreed that it would be a good idea to make it into a single movie. But, he himself dies in the latter half of the movie. To talk about what kind of person he was, and you can’t really talk about it in a first-person way, because he cannot talk about his own strengths or how foolish he was and that kind of thing, we needed to have some other perspective. Then we thought about this daughter, who was unnamed in the original story. Her brothers die in the battle in the story, but her fate is not really written so we don’t know what happened to her, she might have lived. The idea was to have her as the protagonist.
That was the first idea that we had, and while in the process of developing this character of Hèra if you focus on the fact that Helm Hammerhand actually refused the marriage proposal by Dunlending, that must mean that he really loved his daughter and he cared about her, and that’s why he didn’t want her to marry this man. And when you start thinking about that, that led me to think that maybe she was the kind of person using the kind of status as princess, she may have been living a very free life.
We made her into a more of a free-spirited kind of character. Because she was probably brought up by a shieldmaiden, that’s why she learned how to use a sword. She was a princess of Rohan so she’s been an excellent horse rider since she was a child.
Helm also lost his wife early, which means that when Hèra was born, his wife was already gone, so he must have raised her with love. As I made the backstory, Hèra’s character became bigger and we ended up depicting her as a very independent, free-spirited woman. As a result, she became the first female protagonist of the Lord of the Rings.
The War of Rohirrim premieres on December 12 (December 13 in the US). It stars Gaia Wise as Hèra and Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand. Miranda Otto returns as Éowyn, but this time in the role of a narrator. If you’re a fan of The Lord of the Rings, consider giving it a go this holiday season, as it is a true labor of love.
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