Get Ready For a New Anime ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie

Helm Hammerhand is getting his closeup. Lord of the Rings fans certainly know of whom we speak! For everyone else, here’s what we mean.

Hammerhand was the ninth King of Rohan, a human of superior strength who fought barehanded, and the namesake of the formidable fortress that bears his name, Helm’s Deep. And now he’ll stand front and center in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a just-announced animated feature from New Line and Warner Bros. Animation. Kenji Kamiyama, the Japanese writer-director-animator of such anime fare as Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045, Ultraman, and several Cyborg 009 iterations, is confirmed to direct. To be clear, the project bears no connection to Amazon Prime’s upcoming live-action series, The Lord of the Rings, which is in production now. In fact, The War of the Rohirrim takes place more than 250 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings.

At the moment, Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, are not involved with The War of the Rohirrim. Interestingly, however, The War of the Rohirrim is meant to connect with Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, at least tangentially. Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote all three Lord of the Rings films (winning an Oscar for The Return of the King) and all three of the Hobbit adventures, is on board as a consultant. Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the duo who penned The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, have written the screenplay. According to the trade paper Variety, the voice casting is already underway. “This will be yet another epic portrayal of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world that has never been told before,” Sam Register, President of Warner Bros. Animation, said in a statement. “We’re honored to partner with much of the incredible talent behind both film trilogies, along with new creative luminaries to tell this story.”The most epic of all the epic battles in The Two Towers went down in Helm’s Deep. So, a whole movie devoted to Helm Hammerhand? Count us in, deep.