The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim arrived in cinemas in December 2024 as something the franchise had never attempted before: a full-length anime film set two centuries before Bilbo Baggins finds the One Ring. The project began not with a grand creative vision but with a legal deadline. New Line Cinema needed to fast-track a new Tolkien film to hold onto its adaptation rights, and the announcement came in June 2021, during celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson's original trilogy. What emerged from that urgent starting point was a story about a king who kills a man with his bare fist, a war that burns through an entire winter, and a daughter whose name Tolkien never even bothered to record. Who was Helm Hammerhand? What did his daughter actually do when Rohan nearly fell? And how do you animate a world millions of people feel they already own?

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• 2. The Daughter Without a Name

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  Tolkien's appendices to The Lord of the Rings describe the deaths of Helm and his two sons, Haleth and Hama, in some detail. His daughter receives no name at all. Producer Philippa Boyens and the writing team decided she would become the film's protagonist. The first name proposed for her did not begin with "H", but Boyens felt it should match the initial shared by Helm, Haleth, and Hama. Fran Walsh suggested naming the character after Hera Hilmar, the Icelandic actress who starred in the 2018 film Mortal Engines, which Walsh and Jackson also produced. For the film, the name is spelled Héra, rooted in Old English, with no intended connection to the goddess of Ancient Greek religion. Screenwriters Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou did not want to invent her personality from nothing. Director Kenji Kamiyama suggested they model her partly on the historical English ruler Æthelflæd, who played a role similar to the one Héra fills in the story and who was herself a source of inspiration for Tolkien. Gaia Wise, who voices Héra, described her as rebellious and complicated. Wise compared her not to Éowyn or Arwen but to the female heroes in Hayao Miyazaki's films, specifically citing Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind from 1984. The writers deliberately avoided the warrior-princess archetype, which they felt had become a tired convention. Their focus stayed on the choices Héra makes and the choices made by others that reshape her life.

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• 3. Rights, Deadlines, and a Fast-Tracked Film

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  Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews wrote the initial screenplay. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Boyens asked her own daughter, Phoebe Gittins, and Gittins's writing partner Arty Papageorgiou to rewrite it. Boyens called them the franchise's "next generation". Both writers were hesitant at first, aware of the reverence fans and creators alike hold for Tolkien's work and for Jackson's adaptations. What convinced them was the roster of collaborators already attached, many of whom had worked on the Jackson films directly. Kamiyama, returning from Warner Bros.' anime series Blade Runner: Black Lotus, pushed to include elements the initial script lacked, particularly the mechanics of besieging a fortified position. He worked with Gittins and Papageorgiou to emphasize the war's claustrophobic and horrific qualities rather than its large-scale spectacle. The story was chosen over other candidates partly because its timeline predates Sauron's active influence and the One Ring, freeing the writers from the weight of those larger events. Boyens said the conflict gave them space to examine honor, revenge, family, and what she called the "wreckage of war". Jackson and his trilogy co-writer Fran Walsh were not formally involved during most of production, but Boyens used them as a sounding board. They were credited as executive producers by June 2024.

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• 4. Assembling the Cast

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  Brian Cox was cast as Helm Hammerhand. Boyens traced her confidence in Cox to a 1987 stage production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in which Cox had performed. He had also been part of the English voice cast for Blade Runner: Black Lotus, where Kamiyama and producer Joseph Chou had directed him before. Miranda Otto, who played Éowyn in Jackson's trilogy, returned to voice the same character as the film's narrator. The casting of Éowyn as narrator gave the story the quality of oral tradition, which Boyens felt suited a film built from fragments and footnotes in Tolkien's appendices. Luke Pasqualino voiced Wulf, the Dunlending leader seeking revenge for his father's death. Boyens noted that Wulf, unlike most antagonists in the franchise, is neither a dark wizard nor a supernatural lord but an ordinary human being, which she said made him both more interesting and more dangerous. The film's most unusual casting decision involved Christopher Lee, who had portrayed Saruman in all six of Jackson's Middle-earth films and died in June 2015. The producers used an archival recording of Lee, sourcing an alternate take from The Hobbit film trilogy. They received permission from Lee's wife, Birgit Kroencke, before her own death in June 2024. Boyens was not persuaded that any living actor could replicate Lee's voice and was relieved the archival recording proved usable. Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan, who played Pippin Took and Merry Brandybuck in the original trilogy, took small roles as two Orcs named Shank and Wrot.

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• 5. Animating in Two and Three Dimensions

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  Sola Entertainment began animation work from the moment of the film's public announcement in June 2021. The approach Kamiyama developed was unusual for traditional 2D animation. Actors performed every scene using motion capture, which was translated into three-dimensional animation inside Unreal Engine's real-time game engine. That 3D environment determined camera angles and movements. Artists then used the 3D version as a reference while creating hand-drawn 2D drawings; Kamiyama explicitly ruled out rotoscoping, which would have traced directly over the 3D frames. The resulting animation maintained the feel of hand-drawn work while achieving more fluid movement. Richard Taylor of Wētā Workshop, along with illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, all returned from Jackson's films to work on the production. Old models from Wētā's archives informed some of the designs. The visual philosophy drew from Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, especially their attention to small details, but did not attempt to simply recreate Jackson's live-action aesthetic in drawn form. One of the biggest practical challenges was horses. Rohan's culture is built around them, and horses are notoriously difficult to animate convincingly. By June 2024, the film had grown to two and a half hours, having started as a planned 90-minute feature, and more than 60 companies had been brought in to help complete the work. Animation was finished by late October of that year.

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• 6. Score, Song, and Sound

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  Stephen Gallagher, who had served as music editor on Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, composed the score. He built on Howard Shore's established musical language for Middle-earth and reprised Shore's Rohan theme from the original trilogy. Recording began in March 2024 with the New Zealand-based Stroma ensemble, who contributed wind and string instruments. Brass instruments and taiko drums were recorded at Angel Recording Studios in London that same month. Crumhorns and shawms were captured at London's Air-Edel Recording Studios. Soloist Karen Bentley Pollick was recorded remotely in Mexico playing the Hardanger fiddle, the instrument Shore had featured prominently for Rohan's music in the earlier films. The Tudor Consort choral group, also based in New Zealand, contributed in May. Harpist Michelle Velvin and singer Barbara Paterson were among the last New Zealand-based contributors; recording there wrapped on the 20th of August. Sessions at Angel Studios and Air-Edel followed, and recording for the complete score finished on the 28th of August. The sound mix took place at Park Road Post in Wellington. Gallagher completed his work on the film on the 3rd of October. An original song, "The Rider", was written by Gittins and composer David Long, who had also contributed music to Jackson's films. Paris Paloma performed it, and WaterTower Music released it digitally on the 15th of November alongside a music video. A full soundtrack album followed in December.

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• 7. Release and Reception

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  The film premiered at Leicester Square in London on the 3rd of December 2024, before wide theatrical release in international markets from the 5th and in the United States on the 13th. The original release date had been the 12th of April, but the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike caused schedule changes across the industry that pushed the film to December. It opened in the United States alongside Kraven the Hunter, finishing its opening weekend in fifth place behind Moana 2, Wicked, Kraven the Hunter, and Gladiator II, with a debut of $4.6 million from 3,500 theatres. The worldwide total reached $20.7 million against a production budget of $30 million. The digital release arrived on the 27th of December, only 14 days after the US theatrical debut; that unusually short window was a direct response to low box office performance and competition for screens during the holiday season. The film reached Blu-ray on the 18th of February and began streaming on Max on the 28th of February. Critics were divided. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a "B". One prominent review on RogerEbert.com awarded 2 stars out of 4, praising the voice cast and fight sequences but calling the film "a ghastly imitation of the franchise's better films". Stephen Gallagher received a nomination for Best Original Score for an Animated Film at the 2024 International Film Music Critics Association Awards, recognition that the score's careful extension of Shore's work had not gone unnoticed.

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