Fire and Ice: Excellent Poster, Weak Follow Through

My comments on Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated film Fire and Ice will be brief. Fitting considering the film comes in at a terse 81 minutes. What is most incredible is that at times the film actually feels like it is dragging. The entire movie is shorter than an episode of Saturday Night Live and it still feels like it drags! I can confidently say that this is due to the fact there are huge sections of the movie (if there even can be huge sections in a movie where yawning can cause you to miss 1/4-1/3 of the film) with little to no dialogue. Granted sometimes the subhumans' screeches were kind of cool, but still. Bakshi must have been thinking to himself, "Why would I want to ruin a perfectly good movie with dialogue?" Not terrible logic if your film is perfectly good. Unfortunately this is not a claim that Fire and Ice can make.

The film opens with a pretty cool monologue setting up the story. There is an evil ice queen who has a son and trains him in the dark arts (ice). This pushes everybody south to this generous king who has a castle on a volcano (fire). It pretty much goes down hill from there. The main character, Larn (seriously?), is forgettable. He has a pretty sweet braid/mullet thing going on, but he doesn't really do anything. He spends most of the movie just running around...seriously. In fact, he doesn't even really need to be in the movie. I will repeat that statement so the implications can settle in: The main character doesn't really need to be in the movie. Then there is the female lead Teegra or Tygra (its not really important). Every scene she is on screen it is basically animated soft core porn. She wears little more than a g-string and a couple of gossamer triangles of fabric to cover her ample assets. Knowing that the film was rotoscoped makes me wonder what the actual woman looked like because the disparity would be interesting. Also, at no point in the film did she wear any type of footwear , which I acknowledge is dumb to let bother me, but still, she was running through the forest and over rocky crags and ON A GLACIER!

The one bright spot is this dude:

Yeah, look at that badass. His name is Darkwolf, which I guess is kind of awesome. I believe in the preview they describe him as"mysterious". He is definitely that. Why does he wear a wolf (I am assuming) pelt on his head? Where did he come from? Why does he keep saving Larn? Why does he hate Nekron (the bad guy with a classic bad guy name) so much? Yes, mysterious is one way to describe him, but I would probably use a different word: excellent. Basically every time this guy comes on the screen, he lets out a totally eardrum shattering primal yell. Then it goes into a slow motion sequence of him just totally bringing the hammer down (or in his case the axe) on anybody who gets in his way. That's just how Darkwolf rolls. He gets into some sort of crazy battle rage (for reasons unknown) and just gut slices or brains everybody around him. Another interesting thing about his fight with Nekron is that he is inexplicably immune to Nekron's magic. Maybe that's why he wears the pelt on his head. More likely he is just too much of a hardass berserker for it to have any effect on him. Why couldn't this guy be the main character?

Anyway, the rotoscoping is pretty cool. If you don't know anything about it you should read the wikipedia article that I linked to above. It worked really well in this film. Bakshi utilizes this same process in his version of Lord of the Rings and in Wizard, but to be honest, in those movies it kind of makes me sick. In this movie what it does is allow the animators to capture movement in a very realistic manner. This film and Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs are two of the best examples of what I am going to call "realistic rotoscoping." If you want to sort of see the opposite of that and how interesting and artistic rotoscoping can be you should check out 2001's Waking Life, but fair warning, half the people in the room will hate it and the other half will think that it is sweet. Hopefully you will be in the latter camp (I am so you will be in good company).

So yeah, I didn't really like Fire and Ice all that much. Maybe my expectations were too high because the poster is so promising. I was kind of hoping for a lost gem or something. The preview made it look sweet. I mean there definitely were some cool parts. It shouldn't really be too hard with a jacked guy with an axe, a scantily clad princess, and some big beasties. But with a really weak story line and really weak characters, (save Darkwolf obviously) it fell short. The rotoscoping was really good, but it wasn't enough to carry the film. Oh yeah, one more thing. At the end the generous king has his minions pull this lever to overflow the volcano and help destroy the glacier, which they already established was pretty far away. So basically everything at the end gets covered in searing hot, face melting lava. What?! Where is everyone going to live?! Terrible idea.

Sorry I lead you astray. My comments weren't all that brief, but if you got this far I guess you didn't hate it so you're welcome.

Thanks for reading and keep watching.