Tygra, la glace et le feu

I loved this as a kid, but seeing it as a 19 year old I did like it but don't love it. While the animation is great, some of the effects have a choppy look to them, but the story and script were the biggest problems. The action scenes are great and I liked the sense of fantasy but overall the story is basically a very overly-simplistic good vs. evil tale. The script is very cheesy and meandering. However, the animation is great, with beautiful backgrounds, strong colours and characters that are reasonably well modelled. The characters are engaging enough, nothing extraordinary, but at least effort is done to make us care for them. The music is both rousing and mystical. The voice acting is good considering what they had to work with. Overall, good but imperfect. 7/10 Bethany Cox

This animation has a very simple and straightforward good vs. evil plot and is all about action. What sets it apart from other animation is how well the human movements are animated. It was really beautiful seeing the fleeing woman running around on the screen from left to right and look around, her movements were done so well. Why don't they use this rotoscopic technique more these days? It's quite effective.

Fire and Ice, in it's prehistoric setting and scarcely dressed women, was clearly devoted to showing the beautiful damsel in distress in various sexy ways, her voluptuous body serving as pure eyecandy. Some may hate this and regard it as yet another moronic male sexual fantasy, others (including plenty of women) will adore it's esthetic quality. I for sure did not mind! Bakshi just loves animating lushious, voluptuous babes, as can also be seen in Cool World, and I don't think he has to apoligize since it's pretty much animation for adults. But I had also enjoyed this animation as a child and I never forgot it.

This one was just special, so different from the standard Disney or Anime fare, and for that reason alone well worth the watch since it's possibly Bakshi's finest. For those who like animations with lushious women: try Space Adventure Cobra as well.

I give Fire and Ice 8 out of 10.

Fire and Ice is Ralph Bakshi's animated vision of Frank Frazetta's fantasy world (who even assisted in the making of this feature). The story is your basic tale of good verse evil; a ruthless sorcerer and his mother are intent on taking over the world, using their power to spawn ice glaciers to achieve this goal. Their last resistance is Fire Keep, a city built around a volcano. Really, the story and characters are kept simple while the showcase of this movie is the animation and action. Bakshi uses a process known as rotoscoping in this film (not his first time though). Rotoscoping is when actors are shot in live action and then later drawn over and added into the backgrounds. Nowadays, you might call it a form of motion capture. Anyway, the effect is actually pretty cool, bringing a certain realism to the characters that is absent from traditional animation. Keeping this in mind, we now come to the action in this movie, of which there is plenty. The movie only takes breaks to set up the next scene of combat for our two warrior heroes. It's often rather brutal, involving swords, spears, axes, and arrows. Aside from taking on gangs of Subhumans (the evil foot soldiers), there are also a few mythical-type creatures to deal with. Fire and Ice is the third Bakshi production I've seen and at that, the best. While I think it could've been better, it's still a fairly fun and entertaining fantasy picture, and I believe that's all it's meant to be. The Limited Edition DVD from Blue Underground does the movie justice with a decent transfer (the video shows some age but the audio is fine) and a few featurettes. There's also a sufficient commentary with Lance Laspina and Bakshi, who comes off as a bit of a jerk. Finally, the set includes Laspina's documentary, Frazetta: Painting with Fire.

By the way, for those in the know, John would love Princess Teegra, a voluptuous, scantly-clad lady right out of one of Frazetta's pictures!

Outstanding... it is a masterpiece of its time. The details and the beauty of human figures are so smoothly pictured here. It is truly one of the best animated movies ever made. The gesture and motion is perfect and look at those brush strokes background whenever the casts run. So beautifully made.

It is a mature movie and intended to be appreciated maturely...

I first saw this film way back, probably when I was 7 or 8 years old and it impressed me then as it does now. I'm a fan of animation in general be it anime, American animation or otherwise. The beautiful animation of this film holds up well even today in our age of computer animated everything. In fact, every new animated film that comes out uses the same tried and true crappy looking mix of CGI and animation and to be honest, I'm tired of it. I miss those days of hand painted, hand drawn animation. This is a fine example of bygone days where animation got along just fine without the use of bad looking CGI and computer overlayed animation. This is an excellent film and anyone at all interested in fantasy, D&D or just animation in general should most definitely find yourself a copy of this film.

-Daguon