In JRR Tolkien’s written work the Battle of Helm’s Deep is not the climax of anything. It occupies a few pages in the middle of The two towersand yet within the cinema it has served to culminate up to two films in style. The best known, of course, is the monumental sequence towards the end of the adaptation of The two towers homonyms that Peter Jackson made in 2002, but much earlier, in 1978, it was also useful to conclude the lord of the rings by Ralph Bakshi. In this case in a somewhat strange way, since Bakshi was not going to have the opportunity to adapt The return of the king a posteriori. His reading of Tolkien would remain unfinished, his ambitious animated film destined for cult status.
Part of the first major adaptation of the lord of the rings to the cinema, to continue with the shocking elements, it was also filmed in Spain. In Cuenca and specifically in the Belmonte castle, which was the setting chosen to emulate the Helm’s Deep that the Uruk-hai attacked. The reason why this film, despite being animated, had to work with actors was due to the technique used by Bakshi: rotoscopingwhich basically involves recording real performances and scenarios, and then coloring them. It is a strategy little respected in the world—“a crutch for artists without skill,” described it by Disney animator Donald W. Graham—to which Bakshi resorted out of experimental as well as logistical interest: it is quite cheap.
Rotoscoping gave an extra quality to the lord of the rings beyond the bewilderment, when the fight of those very recognizable figures was fierce and realistic, even bloody. As the production was running out of money, there were fewer and fewer means to hide the acting component, and when the Battle of Helm Gandalf’s Deep arrived it didn’t even look like a cartoon. It is a complicated reference to handle, in short. Kenji Kamiyama, as director of The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrimhas stated that his great influence on the visual aspect of the film is Jackson’s trilogy, but his images contradict him.
The Rohirrim War has not used rotoscoping, but rather a more convoluted process. The drawing style is anime for such is the Japanese Kamiyama school, nevertheless having a complementary role in the development: real performers have been recorded before, their movements have then been recorded with motion captureand the processed digital image has been transferred to 2D. The final finish is something like a refined rotoscoping, less crude than that technique but with a similarly tremulous and slow rhythm. It is a finish that has already sparked ridicule and criticism on social networks based on the trailers, and the truth is that Warner has asked for it a bit.
Middle Earth is the least of it
Beyond the battle between good and evil orchestrated by Tolkien, another battle, much tacky and just as globalized, unfolds in the real world. It is the battle between Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon to see who makes the most profit from the work of the British writer, and it is a battle in which Warner obviously had the upper hand at the beginning, thanks to the beloved Jackson trilogy and his much less beloved trilogy of the hobbit. But lo and behold, Amazon paid up to $250 million in 2017 for the rights to part of Tolkien’s writings. He could not adapt the story of those films again, although he could adapt everything that was outside their margins.
Maybe at Warner they thought they had rested on their laurels when Amazon began to develop The rings of power. A prequel series that, even though it established nostalgic bridges with Jackson’s work, flowed completely outside the power of Warner, and came to compete in the same summer of 2022 with another heroic fantasy saga under the umbrella of this major, the dragon housea prequel to game of thrones. In all this time, after its merger with Discovery above all, the priorities of Warner’s management had changed slightly. The audience ratings of The rings of power (revealed, ahem, by Amazon itself) indicated that they had to hurry to continue taking advantage of their part of the Tolkienian license.
When The Rohirrim War was greenlit four years ago, Warner’s goal was as simple as not losing the rights to Tolkien—it’s the same reason, for example, that has led to so many failed Tolkien films. The Fantastic Four waiting to see what Kevin Feige’s Marvel Studios does next year—, without much faith in the results. Now that it is released The Rohirrim War There is another board, and beset by debts and communication crises, Warner intends to squeeze all the intellectual properties it can, through all possible channels. The destiny of game of thrones emanates from here, just like the series that expand Dune, The Batmanand that other one who wants to adapt the books of harry potter.
The Rohirrim Warfor its part, is the vanguard of an operation to make Middle-Earth profitable under the control of Warner, which for now will precede a film starring Andy Serkis titled The Hunt for Gollum. These are the times, and as these are tricks whose desperation is evident, there is a climate of distrust towards everything that Warner can do with its brands. In the case of The Rohirrim War passing over the profile of Kamiyama: a filmmaker who has been working at the Japanese studio Production IG since the 90s, and who, guided by the legendary Mamoru Oshii, has developed several series within the universe Ghost in the Shell.
Come 2017, Kamiyama had directed the extraordinary Ancien and the magical worldyour gateway to Hollywood. Before The Rohirrim WarTherefore, Kamiyama has worked on the franchises of blade runner and Star Wars: for the first one he signed The black lotusand for the animated anthology Star Wars Visions another short titled The ninth Jedi. Kamiyama’s resume should be enough to ward off The Rohirrim War of its painful industrial conditions. And of course it is an artistic vision that prevails, although traces of this Hollywood decline persist.
This is how Helm’s Deep was made
Taking advantage of the portion of rights that Amazon does not possess, The Rohirrim War refer to the Appendices the lord of the rings to tell an episode in the history of the kingdom of Rohan, taking into account how Helm’s Deep received its name. King Helm Hammerhand’s fight against the Dunlending invaders is limited to disputes between humans within the margins of Rohan and takes place several centuries before the trilogy. the lord of the rings. So in principle it would be somewhat difficult to turn it into a parade of nods to Jackson’s films… or it would be difficult if there was a minimum of shame. Something the industry lacks right now.
In what seem like last minute impositions, The Rohirrim War uses a couple of cameos and “surprises”, the most eccentric being the appearance of Saruman already revealed in the trailers. Saruman speaks with the voice of Christopher Lee thanks to an outtake recording of the hobbit —Lee has been dead for nine years—, although the nostalgic exhumation mostly ends there: the story is narrated by Éowyn (Miranda Otto) and the music by Stephen Gallagher makes extensive use of Howard Shore’s original themes, but both issues are resolved with certainty. coherence. Gallagher’s score, without going any further, can find its own path from there.
On Éowyn’s part it turns out that The Rohirrim War is not any flashback because the story is limited to that conflict from Rohan’s past: that Éowyn guides us only complements the fact that the absolute protagonist is another princess of Rohan like she was. We are talking about Héra, daughter of Helm and an unnamed character in Tolkien’s writings. Here her role was reduced to having been the trigger of the war against the Dunlendings due to Helm’s refusal to marry her to their prince, called Wulf. Wulf is precisely the villain of The Rohirrim Warenriching his role and his relationship with Héra simultaneously with the rest of the conflict.
The Rohirrim War then differs from The rings of power in that it does not take advantage of “writing gaps” in the Tolkienian corpus to develop a fiction with echoes of fanfiction: on the contrary, it adapts a story belonging to said corpus as is. What may perhaps be a risky move: the cadence of the dialogues and the scale of the adventures are articulated according to the voice of Tolkien – someone who, in reality, always wrote in verse – so that the tone of The Rohirrim War refer to something similar to Song of my Cid, where more than characters there are heroic archetypes, and everyone is very concerned with inspiring songs for posterity.
Kamiyama’s narration is respectful of the written word to the point of hindering the narrative rhythm – if we are surprised by what happens to Helm once they arrive in Hornville, it is because Tolkien arranged it that way -, while at the same time he is able to collect succulent benefits. The Rohirrim War It is a fundamentally war film, where the violence that this new rotoscoping recovers from Ralph Bakshi—and which becomes brutal both during the first confrontation with the oliphant and in what happens right after—is perfectly aligned with epicness.
The Rohirrim War channels Jackson’s greatness in his massive battles, his nighttime skirmishes and his beautiful settings – New Zealand turned into a hyperrealistic anime – and adds other effective ingredients from his crop, such as everything that surrounds Héra, her companion Olwyn, and the legend of the warrior maidens. In this section he is not afraid to correct Tolkien to meet him again from another angle, and straighten the cinematographic pavilion of Middle Earth with a firmness that we did not know from the first the hobbit. It doesn’t matter that the productive circumstances are difficult and that these executives don’t care about Tolkien at all: his greatness is stronger than them, and he has found an exceptional accomplice in Kamiyama’s team.
#Lord #Rings #suits #anime #War #Rohirrim #violent #ferocious #spectacle
