Ahead of its theatrical release, story writer and producer Philippa Boyens talked about the plot, characters, and themes in ‘War of the Rohirrim’ in a new chat with BAFTA. She shared why the film didn’t include established ‘Lord of the Rings’ elements like the Rings of Power.
“The journey for this particular story being told in anime form is really interesting because Warner [Bros.] approached us in about 2019 with the idea of perhaps doing an animated film, and then immediately you think, ‘Well, what form of animation?’ and then, ‘What story?’ And it took a while to marry those two thoughts together,” Boyens explained. “And it wasn’t until – I think it was 2021 – they came to us and said, ‘What about anime?’ And weirdly the story immediately popped into my mind.”
“I instinctually felt it was going to fit within the great Japanese filmmaking, anime tradition, that this particular story would work because interestingly, it has all those nested themes of loyalty, honor, family, rivalry, betrayal. All of those sort of elements are in there.”
“And it was going to tick all the kind of boxes that we were looking for initially, which is, we wanted a standalone movie,” she noted. “We wanted one that wasn’t involving the Rings of Power or Sauron the Dark Lord. We wanted a story that wasn’t going to necessarily pull in any of the original characters from the live action movies. Not that I don’t think you could do that. It’s just, returning in this way to Middle Earth, we wanted it to be fresh and to be able to introduce audiences to new characters.”
Kenji Kamiyama directed ‘War of the Rohirrim’ from a screenplay by Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou. The story, set 183 years before Peter Jackson’s trilogy, followed Helm Hammerhand and his family defending their kingdom against an invading army of Dunlendings.
The producer revealed the new lore’s origins, saying, “So, when you look at the actual story that we’re drawing upon within the books, it’s seemingly only a few pages within the appendices. However, if you really look at it, there’s a lot more there that you can draw upon within the greater context of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books.”
“So, the culture of the Rohirrim runs all the way through from book two, right the way through to the end of ‘Return of the King,’” she continued. “You know, the Rohirrim are in there. So, we had a strong sense of them as a culture and a people and their history. We had a strong sense of the tradition of the Shield Maidens, of course, from the great character of Eowyn.”
“Outside of that, we also had a sense of what was happening in the world at that time historically, which I love because it dealt with a period of time in Middle Earth’s history called The Long Winter, which affected not only the Rohirrim but actually up in the north, it was affecting the Hobbits in the Shire. It was affecting Gondor. No one, not even the Orcs, were immune from the effects of this long winter that just held fast for months after months after months. So, that was really interesting to kind of think about a siege within the context of this kind of time frame.”
The voice cast for ‘War of the Rohirrim’ included Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand, Gaia Wise as Héra, and Luke Pasqualino as Wulf.
