“Is anyone here new to the Lord of the Rings or Tolkein?” Stephen Colbert joked with the audience on Friday during New York Comic Con’s preview panel for Warner Bros Animation’s Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The Late Show host and Lord of the Rings super-fan, serving as the panel’s moderator, chuckled at the near-complete silence he got in response from a packed Javits Center conference room.
The panel included the pic’s producer and Oscar winner Philippa Boyens and actor Brian Cox, who voices King Helm Hammerhand.
Boyens said that there was always a plan of “getting back to Middle Earth.”
“They said what about anime, and this story sprang to mind immediately; I had a gut feeling that Rohirrim would work,” she said.
“I think we have tried to be faithful, “Boyens added.
“We never change anything lightly, and when we add, we try to draw from sources that feel authentic to the world.” Boyens added, “It is never not a gift to go back into that incredible imagination of Professor Tolkien.”
The anime feature, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, is set 183 years before the events chronicled in The Hobbit. It centers on the fate of the House of Helm Hammerhand, the mighty King of Rohan, a character from the appendix of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Succession star Cox is the voice of the protagonist.
A sudden attack by Wulf, a clever and ruthless Dunlending lord seeking vengeance for the death of his father, forces Helm and his people to make a daring last stand in the ancient stronghold of the Hornburg – a mighty fortress that will later come to be known as Helm’s Deep. Finding herself in an increasingly desperate situation, Hera, Helm’s daughter, must summon the will to lead the resistance against a deadly enemy intent on their total destruction. Among the plot points, Hammerhand must have his daughter wed the notorious Freca.
Cox described his character’s relationship with Hera, voiced by Gaia Wise as “father-daughter” born that king and subject.
“His daughter is really close to him. Helm is an elected king, he doesn’t come though any divine right of kinds. This is the special part of his life. It’s the raison d’etre. The idea that he’s marrying her off to a horrific individual is totally against his being,” added the Succession thespian.
Before Colbert walked on, a short teaser for the film was shown displaying a map of Middle Earth, with the view zeroing in on Rohan, and the image dissolving from map to mountain terrain. The familiar Rohan theme score from the LOTR films plays as an eagle soars above. They also showed a motion poster (see that above.
Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the process for the animated movie.
Colbert introduced a longer reel with multiple clips from the movie, and voice-over from Miranda Otto as Eowyn, her character from Peter Jackson’s original live-action trilogy. The first sequence shows an army encampment besieged by a winter storm and an unknown creature stalking and killing soldiers of Rohan, amid rumors that the marauding figure is the rumored-to-be-fallen king of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand, returned from the dead.
In this heightened climate of fear, Helm’s daughter, Hera (voiced by Gaia Wise) — a new Lord of the Rings universe character created for the film — chases an elusive, spectral figure she believes to be her father through the bowels of a keep, only to emerge on the opposite end of a cave facing a towering horned creature.
There are orcs, battle scenes, a ring of power — “What does Morder want with rings, anyways?” one orc snarls — and the familiar winsome Rohan theme.
The panel fielded audience questions and, after a few, an unnamed fan was piped in on the video screens. It was the pic’s EP and Lord of the Rings movie architect Peter Jackson himself, with a stumper of a question for Colbert: Name the breed line of Rohirrim horses that begat Gandalf’s white steed, Shadowfax.
“The Mearas!” Colbert shouted, delivering the correct answer to audience cheers.
The voice cast also includes Otto, Lorraine Ashbourne (Netflix’s Bridgerton), Yazdan Qafouri (I Came By), Benjamin Wainwright (BBC One’s World on Fire), Laurence Ubong Williams (Gateway), Shaun Dooley (Netflix’s The Witcher), Michael Wildman (Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), Jude Akuwudike (Beasts of No Nation), Bilal Hasna (BBC’s Sparks) and Janine Duvitski (ITV’s Benidorm).
War of the Rohirrim is executive produced by Boyens, from the screenwriting team behind The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, and produced by Joseph Chou (Blade Runner: Black Lotus TV series). The writing team of Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou wrote the screenplay from a script by Jeffrey Addiss & Will Matthews, based on Tolkein’s book. The team of creative collaborators returning from The Lord of the Rings trilogy also includes Oscar winners Alan Lee and Richard Taylor, along with Tolkien illustrator John Howe.
The War of the Rohirrim opens on December 13. It’s the second feature animated Lord of the Rings movie stateside after the 1978 Ralph Bakshi-directed title.