What a fun film this was. This 1983 adventure plays out like He-Man for grown ups. The story starts with Nekron, master of ice (there's you titular Ice) and controller of a giant glacier waging war on a small village of loin cloth wearing dudes. Nekron and his big ice cube are on their way to the fire (and here's your Fire) keep, destroying all that get in their way.

After a few introductions, Larn, survivor of the village massacre teams up with Teegra, voluptuous princess of the fire keep (after she escapes kidnapping by Nekron's thugs). Eventually, these two meet up with Darkwolf, the ultimate axe wielding tough guy. There is a little pterodactyl back riding, and then these three get serious. Will they prove a match for Nekron master of ice and his sorcerous abilities? I don't want to spoil the ending, but you can probably guess.

While the message may not be as strong as that delivered in Bakshi's Wizards, this movie doesn't masquerade as a kiddie film, nor is it prententious. The animation is more stylized and realistic with a peppering of booty thanks to the efforts of artist Frank Frazetta. Also, here is an example of rotoscoping that really works. This entire film was created by filming live actors, then animating over them resulting in "cartoons" that move with stunning realism. Unfortunately, while I am not sure how much this film cost to produce, I am sure it was more than the $760,000 it earned. Something most have gone wrong in marketing, because while the story is fairly straight forward, Fire & Ice is good semi clean fun worthy of a B.

What fun! A movie so awful it's a joy to watch--you can't tear your eyes away from it!

An evil wizard lord decides he wants to marry a particular princess, and has his band of minions (grunting sub-humans who have a very offensively negroid look to them) kidnap her, conveniently while she's undressing.

Most of the rest of the movie involves the princess in her skimpy underwear running around, being chased by the minions, while the muscle-bound and equally skimpily-dressed (woo!) barbarian hero runs around after them through various stereotypical fantasy situations.

Frank Frazetta, the famous fantasy artist, worked on this film, and his contribution shows. The chase moves from set piece to set piece, gorgeous scenes that look like living fantasy paintings, except for the fact that they have these horrible, stodgy, rotoscoped cartoon characters running through them. It's eye candy, but it's eye candy that's meant to stand still.

If you like watching nearly-nude cartoon babes or barbarians, enjoy getting furious over racial slurs, or get a kick out of getting together with your friends for MST300-style movie bashing, this is a film you shouldn't miss!

Bad, bad...SOOOO bad!

I remember being tremendously disappointed with this movie when it came out (well, actually I checked, and the day it came out I was at a Dead Kennedy's concert, so I probably wasn't thinking about it much). I was completely disappointed when I got to see it, though.

They say you either love Bakshi's films or hate them. I loved the first three or four, and was prepared to write 'Lord of the Rings' of as an over-ambitious mistake. In fact it turns out that Bakshi made at least one film between LoTR and Fire and Ice which I did enjoy, but it was never released here at the time. 'Fire and Ice' is fantasy again, but instead of the original, not entirely serious, underground, big-hearted fantasy that worked so wonderfully in 'Wizards', or the Tolkien adapation of LoTR which might have been great if it had actually worked, 'Fire and Ice' is a descent into puerile, sterile by-the-book sword and sorcery which lacks any wit, brains or charisma.

In the years since 'Wizards', Ted White had made 'Heavy Metal' magazine hugly successful. It was a sort of mixture of French material (which tended to be surreal or at least cerebral and enigmatic), and American material (which was often good, but at its worst was dumbed-down adventure yarns for 14 year-olds in the vein of Sinbad.) Unfortunately the latter is the style of story which 'Fire and Ice' emulates. You remember the 'Gor' books by John norman? If you liked them you'll probably like this. Enough said, probably.

At the time, or soon after, I seem to remember I read an interview where Bakshi claimed that this was his best film, and that finally he had achieved the fantasy movie he had always been wanting to make (I think he's revised his opinion about his best movie since.) Frustratingly though, many critics at the time seemed to agree with him. To me the film just had no brain, no heart, it was Robert E. Howard style sword and sorcery, not particularly well executed. It was something anyone could have done, whereas nobody but Bakshi could have done 'Wizards' or 'Heavy Traffic'.

The animation is not impressive. You could forgive this in earlier films because there was so much else to like about them, but this time around the film had nothing else to prop it up. There is extensive use of rotoscoping, which gave the film a 'realistic' rather than a 'cartoony' look. Personally I don't watch cartoons for realism, so this was another drag for me. It did provide an amusing anecdote though. Co-producer and character designer Frank Frazetta, very famous at this point for his sword and sorcery drawings of horses and voluptuous women, is supposed to have had a revelation via rotoscoping. "I never quite realized how I was exaggerating the female form," he said. "In the back of my mind I always believed there must be women out there who existed like I draw them."

I really can't find anything to recommend about 'Fire and Ice'. Despite the fact that it saw a recovery of sorts in Bakshi's fortunes at the time, it's a basic, dumb, Conan-like story - he even re-used the 'Nekron' character name from 'Wizards') - and the disappointing animation makes it look terribly dated today. The audience it was intended for in 1983 probably wouldn't give a toss about it today, and neither, I suspect, would most other people else.

Ignore this rubbish and go watch Bakshi's 70's films, which are terrific.