Danica Davidson
December 10, 2024 
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim will hit American theaters this Friday, December 13. Ahead of the highly anticipated release, director Kenji Kamiyama returned for his second interview with Otaku USA (go here for the first), to talk about why anime is a good medium for Tolkien’s work and how he stayed true to the overall lore while also adding his own touch. You can see Otaku USA’s review of the movie here.
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Why do you think anime is a good medium for adapting Tolkien’s work?
Traditionally, anime is very good at portraying something that doesn’t exist, or something you cannot see, as if it was something you can see and [have] exist. That is the advantage of animation, until Peter Jackson managed to achieve [this] in the live-action movies. That kind of Middle Earth was beautifully realized, and realistically realized. So that kind of advantage of anime has already exceeded by way of live-action movies. So what do we do now?
In this case, what we were trying to focus on was how can we utilize what anime is good at in order to tell the story. So, for example, what we’ve done is something we don’t normally do in anime. We challenged ourselves to do that. Like, for example, two thousand riders clashing against the army of Dunlendings, that kind of epic battle sequence. That’s something we don’t normally do, because it’s not [one of] the strengths of anime, but we managed to realize that. The creatures, the Mûmaki or The Watcher [in the Water] and things like that, even though you get to see a little bit in the live-action movie and also in the literature it exists, but it has never been visualized in full. We managed to do that. So we actually add something, like a dynamism to this movie, and we managed to portray Middle Earth beautifully.
How do you stay true to the overall lore from Tolkien while also adding your own touch?
In terms of the visuals, we were trying to focus, for example, on the character of Helm Hammerhand, who is already in the appendices in The Lord of the Rings books. He’s such a famous character. Even though it’s such a short episode, it was impactful because he was so formidable; the strongest king in the history of Rohan. That was not really properly visualized in the way of movies. We have added a character that is not in Tolkien’s lore, the female character, because what we were trying to do was imagine what kind of treatment or the kind of status women had in this era. But that’s not even portrayed in the songs. Even that, we were imagining, maybe there are some women who were living a free life. So that kind of modern theme we were trying to bring into the story as well. By doing that, we feel that we managed to expand the world and universe of Tolkien, which was a challenge in itself. But we think we have managed to do that.
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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.
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