LotR Prequel: Helm Hammerhand and the Battles of Rohan

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/lord-rings-getting-anime-prequel-191744969.html

Hmm...I'm cool with this except I don't understand why Philipa Boyens is a consultant.

I suppose they already had the rights to the appendices so they didn't have to pay through the nose to the Tolkien estate.  We may yet see The Young Aragorn Chronicles.

Slightly more detail here: https://deadline.com/2021/06/lord-of-the-rings-anime-film-the-war-of-the-rohirrim-new-line-1234773024/

Just read this on Twitter. Sounds interesting.

Lord of Rings anime from New Line announced, Philippa Boyens attached
by Justin Sewell
New Line Cinema and Warner Bros animation announce a new animation project LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM from the director of Ghost in the Shell, with film Philippa Boyens attached to consult on the project.

So here's a question. Anime of course is a Japanese style of animation, but is it a specific technique that makes it anime, or is it just a drawing style? I'm wondering if it's just the Japanese director doing the guide drawings that makes it anime.

I don't like it. Never watch it. Untill this comes out of course.

Eowyn

[url=https://servimg.com/view/16656106/619][/ur

Looks a bit childish to me

It's adorable when applied to young women, but what will Helm Hammerhand look like?

Okay, this is too damn funny (by Noe Izumi if I got that right)



(Now I'm imagining her facing off the Witch King, who also has great big eyes  We'll have to get Norc to start imaging characters for us.)

{{ Why would Eowyn be in a film about Helm? They going to shoehorn her in as the person telling the story or some such gimmick to get a recognisable name in there? Or because its another all male story otherwise which Hollywood hates? Also the blurb says it will delve into the untold story of the fortress, but Helm didnt build it he just retreated there, not that different from what happens in LotR's. All that happens of note regarding the fortress is afterwards they change its name to Helm's Deep. So by 'untold story of the fortress' they just mean, why it got a name change?
Mind you my crabbit senses tingle at the mere mention of Boyens the 'Tolkien expert' }}

No, they aren't doing Eowyn, Chris just dug her up as an example of LotR anime. Then it becomes difficult not to run with it.

- Would an anime Gollum look any different?
- Will the orcses be wearing "Hello Kitty" armor?
- Can't wait to see what they'd do with hobbits.

But the crowning achievement will have to be Helm himself. Because when you think "anime" you immediately think "Helm Hammerhand". It's a miracle it took them so long.

halfwise wrote:So here's a question.  Anime of course is a Japanese style of animation, but is it a specific technique that makes it anime, or is it just a drawing style?  I'm wondering if it's just the Japanese director doing the guide drawings that makes it anime.

So, "what is anime?" is a fairly common debate in Western anime fandom. Etymologically, it's just a shortening of アニメーション animeeshon, which is the Japanese loanword form of animation. In Japan, thus, the term anime is applied to all kinds of animation. In the West, the traditional definition is "animation from Japan" (similar to how sake, which in Japanese refers to alcoholic beverages in general, is used in the West to refer to a particular drink with the native name nihonshu, lit. "Japanese alcoholic drink"). However, with the increasing influence of anime on Western animation since at least the early 2000s, some people use the term to refer to all animation produced in "the anime style," regardless of its country of origin. The problem with this is that there isn't a single "anime style." Japanese animation has just as much of diversity of styles as we see in the West. There are certain common, stereotypical elements, like giant eyes—something the Japanese picked up from old school Disney films—but these are far from universal.

In this case, The War of the Rohirrim can plausibly be described as anime since it has a Japanese director, Kenji Kamiyama, and presumably will have some other Japanese staff as well, despite being a production for an American studio. [ETA: The entire animation unit will be based in Japan (source).] I imagine it will be produced in a style that animation fans can be expected to recognize as "anime" or at least "animesque," but that's admittedly speculation on my part.

halfwise wrote:It's adorable when applied to young women, but what will Helm Hammerhand look like?

I have no idea, but here are some characters from some of Kamiyama's previous works (though the first was based on a manga, so the character designs are derived from the original work).

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex



Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit



Eden of the East

Only slightly enlarged eyes. I'm somewhat disappointed. It seems he's been picked for his competence rather than his style. I SO wanted to see a mouse-eyed Helm.

It never occurred to me that the anime style came from Disney, transferred from animals to people. That's such a delightful thought.

What the fuck is a mouse-eyed Helm?

I was gonna post something about what anime is, but of course I was beat to it by our resident anime and definition specialist haha.

Frame-rate is a significant factor. When I see the 16 or whatever frames per second in an animated work, I immediately think "anime".

Thought you were on a spam run, but it was just a tipsy tear.

Um, if the anime eyes come from Disney, the Disney style is rooted in Mickey. So blend Mickey and Helm and you've got an anime Helm.

Warner Bros. animated Middle-earth production, The War of the Rohirrim, is set to debut on screen on April 12, 2024.

The feature-length film is set to focus on the story of the Rohirrim king, Helm Hammerhand, as outlined in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings.

If the film looks like the picture shown then I'm in.

The unlimited power of animation, you can show Middle-earth anyway you like it.

And Rohan is still a desolate wasteland.
Absolutely ridiculous if that promotional art accurately represents the direction that the project is going.

{{ Yup- wheres the acres of waving grasslands? The wild horse herds? The fields and pastures around the city to sustain it? Geographically its the equivalent of the south of France. It should be stunning and warm, not desolate and barren and cold looking. }}

{{ If you look at the sort of landscape the real world produces at such geographical locations here's the south of France- there arent any great flat grasslands, but there is land near mountains-



This far south the mountains should also be much greener, not just exposed cold hard rock, only the very tops should be snowy, given the time of year the books take place there would be some snow still, but summer probably none most years. Rohan should be a green, fertile land with overall good weather. Its warm and generally temperate. And it also has, besides Fangorn on the west, forests in the south, where most of the folk actually live, a place that we've never seen, instead we just get a repeat of PJ's desolate sparse, primitive feeling Rohan. Edoras should not be a town in the middle of nowhere, its positioned on a hill at the end of a valley through which its main water supplies flows down from the mountains.

'green flowed over the wide meads of Rohan; the white mists shimmered in the watervales; and far off to the left, thirty leagues or more, blue and purple stood the White Mountains, rising into peaks of jet, tipped with glimmering snows, flushed with the rose of morning.'

'They seemed to have left winter clinging to the hills behind. Here the air was softer and warmer, and faintly scented, as if spring was already stirring and the sap was flowing again in herb and leaf.'

'The dwellings of the Rohirrim were for the most part many leagues away to the South, under the wooded eaves of the White Mountains'

'The grass-lands rolled against the hills that clustered at their feet, and flowed up into many valleys still dim and dark, untouched by the light of dawn, winding their way into the heart of the great mountains. Immediately before the travellers the widest of these glens opened like a long gulf among the hills. Far inward they glimpsed a tumbled mountain-mass with one tall peak; at the mouth of the vale there stood like sentinel a lonely height. About its feet there flowed, as a thread of silver, the stream that issued from the dale; upon its brow they caught, still far away, a glint in the rising sun, a glimmer of gold. 'Speak, Legolas!' said Gandalf. 'Tell us what you see there before us!'
Legolas gazed ahead, shading his eyes from the level shafts of the new-risen sun. 'I see a white stream that comes down from the snows,' he said. 'Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east. A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it. Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over the land. Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. There men in bright mail stand; but all else within the courts are yet asleep.'

'The morning was bright and clear about them, and birds were singing, when the travellers came to the stream. It ran down swiftly into the plain, and beyond the feet of the hills turned across their path in a wide bend, flowing away east to feed the Entwash far off in its reed-choked beds. The land was green: in the wet meads and along the grassy borders of the stream grew many willow-trees. Already in this southern land they were blushing red at their fingertips. Feeling the approach of spring.'

It'd be very nice if for once someone gave us an adaptation that read the book descriptions first.}}

{{ So I found this map that put Europe and Middle-Earth to scale over each other.



And thought it'd be fun to see where in the real world all the human and dwarf folks would be and what therefore their accents would sound like if you were to make an adaptation based on this map and cast folk from the corresponding geographical regions (examples given where I could find one)

Humans

Shire- Cumbrian, NW England

Spoiler:

Bree- North Yorkshire, England

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Men of Fornost, Arnor- Aberdeen, NE Scotland (Doric dialect).

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Men of Annuimnas, Arnor- Fort William, W. Scotland

Men of Rhudaur- Oslo, Norway

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Angmar- Dombas, Norway

Men of Dale/Laketown – Tallin, Estonia

Spoiler:

Men of Southern Mirkwood- Warsaw, Poland

Spoiler:

Gladden Fields- Malmo, Sweden

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Dunlendings- Cologne, Germany

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Men of Erech – Venice, Italy

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Rohirrim, before they came south (NE. Mirkwood)- Sundsvall, Norway

Rohirrim, after settling Rohan- Vienna, Austria

Spoiler:

S. Ithilien – Podgorica, Montenegro

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N. Gondor (Minas Tirirth) Sagreb, Croatia

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S. Gondor (Dol Amroth) - Rome, Italy

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S. Gondor (disputed lands) – Messina, S. Italy

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Barad-Dur- Petesti, Romania

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Sea of Rhun- Donetsk, Ukraine

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Easterlings- Kazakhstan/Mongolia

Khand- Istanbul, Turkey

Spoiler:

Umbar- Tunis, Tunisia, North Africa

Spoiler:

There are few alterations we can make based on a few things Tolkien wrote. Although Minas Tirith on the map falls into Croatia, we know Tolkien thought of it as being essentially Italian from such things as him signing a letter from Venice as 'from Gondor.' (Venice would actually put him at about Erech on the map).
So we can probably give the inhabitants of Osgiliath in its day, and later MinasTirith Northern Italian accents.

We also know he based the Rohirrim, and their language as he choose to translate it, on Anglo-Saxons. Who were a mix of Danes, Dutch and Belgians who came to Britain following the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Roman withdrawal. But the Rohirim have been settled in their new southern lands a while by the time of LotR's so their accent would have come out of a blend of the three and been the fore runner of the English accent, affected by a dose of Celt from the folk already there.

Given a parallel could be drawn between the Rohirrim coming and taking a new land, with Anglo-Saxons coming to Britain. And the treatment of the native Dunlendings by the Rohirrim and the (at the time of Tolkien's writing) belief the Anglo-Saxons had done similar to the native Celts in a series of violent bloody invasions (its now thought it was more small groups migrating, but consistently over a period of time and it was more just a numbers game and not actually invasions at all).
This would mean that the Dunlendings, shown on the map as being located around current day West Germany would be Celtic in speech, which actually fits with history as the Celts of the UK started out as Germanic tribes moving northwards, so by the time of the LotR's they'd sound something akin to Cornish or Welsh most likely.

Spoiler:

We can also probably move hobbits southward a bit in England too, as the Shire seems based on the places of Tolkien's childhood, its in Cumbria on the map in the NW of England, which given the Shires climate seems a little to far north. Tolkien grew up in Birmingham and the Black Country accents, in the west of the English Midlands not far from Wales.
I  imagine the Gaffer would have sounded in Tolkien's head not unlike the old fellow in this-

Spoiler:

Dwarves

Lonely Mountain- same as Men of Dale, Estonian.

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Iron Hills- St.Petersburg, Russia (quite suitable for Dain)

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Blue Mountains- Killarney, SW Ireland

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Moria- Hamburg, Germany

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It would be interesting to see an adapted version of LotR that had this diversity of accents for the peoples to indicate distance travelled and that they are indeed in different lands and among different cultures. Even if they didn't use these exact accents based on geographical location to the real world, but had that breadth of accents for different races it would greatly help sell the scale of the world the stories are set in. }}

Bah, where's the diversity?


lol, anyway, I love old tucked-away accents that speak to the history of a place. Thanks for the "gaffer" one.

The Estonians brought back happy memories of the last couple of weeks. Mainly the first guy.

I can envision Gondorians speaking a more ancient Rome style of Italian but not modern style of italian.

{{ Well I think if your adapting you'd just be using the general accent of that area of Europe, the language would still be in Tolkiens style so would give it that sense of age.

What struck me when working it all out was just how different folk would sound even within regions. For example someone in Gondor who grew up in South Ithilien would sound like they were from Montenegro, someone from Minas Tirith like they were Crotian and someone from Dol Amroth like a southern Italian. Theyd all be Gondorians, but even within that one region, its so large that the accents would be quite distinct depending on where in Gondor you were from.

Or that the dwarves of the Iron Hills and the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains are as far apart as western Russia is to SW Ireland. With presumably as large a gulf in local dialect and accent.

It's hardly surprising the hobbits accents (either Black Country or Cumbrian)  stood out as being from the Shire to the ears of the folk of Bree, enough to draw comment, as the Breelanders would sound North Yorkshire.

I think when you look at it from the point of view of the accents it effectively drives home the scale of the travels undertaken in the books and the different cultures they pass through. And I'd love for someone to do a version of LotR's taking accents and differences in location into account in a consistent coherent way. }}

What, all dwarves sounding Scottish isn't consistent enough for you?