Making ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Nearly Killed Its Director

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Once considered impossible to adapt, the “Lord of the Rings” movies remain monumental achievements in filmmaking. Peter Jackson and his team brought Middle-earth to the screen and, in the process, set a standard for live-action fantasy, blockbuster epics, and adaptations of big works of fiction. Bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s world into animation has its own pedigree — including Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 version of “The Hobbit” — but “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” was just as daunting to build out in anime as its live-action counterparts.

As director Kenji Kamiyama told IndieWire (via producer Joseph Chou acting as his translator), the production’s specific timeframe was much, much shorter than that of a Japanese anime film. What might take closer to a decade and involve a big set of animation directors was instead done in just a couple of years with a single director — an arduous process Chou candidly talked about as being unprecedented.

“From motion capture data to CG movement to camera check, to every single shot that comes up in terms of drawing, Kamiyama had to look through every single one and check everything,” Chou said of his director. “It’s kind of unprecedented, and he nearly killed himself doing it, but he got it done.”

“War of the Rohirrim” tells the story of Hèra (Gaia Wise), daughter of Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), King of Rohan, as their family defends their country against an army of Dunlendings. It is the first animated “Lord of the Rings” project since 1980’s “The Return of the King: A Story of the Hobbits,” and the first Japanese anime production set in Middle-earth.

This is a rare blockbuster animated project from a major studio done entirely in 2D. Because the animators had a severely limited timeframe in which to work, however, the methods used weren’t the normal 2D workflow. Take the character acting: Rather than relying on animators studying real people and interpreting performances in 2D, “War of the Rohirrim” employed motion capture that was then translated into 2D.

“We had motion capture as a base that the animators would then exaggerate or reinterpret,” Kamiyama told IndieWire. Because the production had to collaborate with international studios and animators worldwide to finish the film in time, it sometimes meant a lot of trial and error. “I’d tell them, ‘Don’t trace,’ but they’d still just trace it, and it would look robotic rather than like natural movement.”

Some shots, however, were still done traditionally, like Hèra’s last duel with Wolf (Luke Pasqualino), which was done entirely using keyframes rather than relying on motion capture, with exaggerated expressions and inhuman movements that accentuated the action. This, Kamiyama explains, gave the film a uniquely anime feel. “You see a lot of stylized sequences that look very different from our live-action counterparts to signal that this is faithful to the Peter Jackson trilogy but is also anime.”

When asked about the use of motion capture as a time-saving measure, the conversation quickly turned into an issue that’s bigger than this one film, but one affecting both the anime industry and also the VFX industry worldwide — a shortage of artists. As Chou tells it, despite anime being in higher demand than ever, there aren’t enough animators available to work on every project. Unlike something like Miyazaki’s snail pace with “The Boy and the Heron” and its numerous delays, “War of the Rohirrim” had to stick with the timeframe given to the crew by the studio.

This meant that the traditional process of trial and error — with the keyframe animators coming up with the individual character performances, then the director giving feedback and the animators going back to the drawing board — would take too long. Likewise, what would normally be a team of around 40 people in-house doing clean-up and corrections on a project of this size was reduced to only two in-house crewmembers for “War of the Rohirrim.” International studios were needed to help out in order to meet the release schedule.

The team at Sola Entertainment quickly had to fan out and approach other companies — a total of over 60 animation studios in Japan and abroad, including some recognizable names in anime, like MAPPA, OLM, Studio 4°C, and Production I.G — as well as rely on Unreal Engine to plan shots. As with other recent animated projects like “Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time,” the production used Unreal to test out shot compositions, layouts, camera angles, and character placements, first rendering them in 3D until Kamiyama was satisfied with a shot, then sending the rough animation to the international partners to turn them into a 2D animated sequence. “There are parts when the camera is moving, and you wonder if it looks too clean like 3D animation, but it’s all done in 2D,” the director said.

The War of the Rohirrim' holding a torch on a snowy night.

The most fantastical creature in the movie, the Watcher in the Water, was handled by a single animator, Hisao Yokobori, known for his work on the “Lupin the Third” franchise. “He is a master animator and only does what he likes,” Chou said. “He asked to do the Watcher and drew the whole thing himself. We had some of it cut because of the runtime, but hopefully, we can show more of his work if we get to do an extended cut.”

But the Watcher wasn’t the biggest challenge. It is said that horses are the hardest animals to draw, let alone animate, and “War of the Rohirrim” has dozens of them. To pull off the very symbol of Roham, the team sent animators to horse farms to ride and film the animals. “We had a reference point for how the horse moves when it trots, or when it moves in herds, which animators could access when drawing,” Chou explained. “When they needed to create a sequence, we’d place a CG model in Unreal, and they’d have to draw it, with the director checking each and every horse.”

It is Kamiyama’s attention to detail as much as anything else, then, that allows the Rohirrim to truly ride to war.

“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is now available on VOD.

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