In 2021, director Kenji Kamiyama tasked Wētā Workshop with joining him on a new adventure but also a familiar, special one — to help bring to life J.R.R. Tolkien’s world for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. 

Set 183 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the anime film tells the story of the House of Helm Hammerhand and their battle to defend the Hornburg fortress, later known as Helm’s Deep. It’s a fantasy tale in a different time and a different medium, but our artists were guided by the same world-building ethos as they were when they first thought about what Middle-earth might look like on screen two decades ago.

For these lands only imagined, our Design Studio dug deep into the legendarium to create beautiful key scene illustrations and original concept drawings of armour, environments, creatures and weapons — as if for a live-action film — which Kamiyama’s team of artists then translated into an animated style. Cue the war horns.