Tygra, la glace et le feu

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!

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

Picked up the movie at the flea market for 4 bucks, sure did get my moneys worth!. Could care-less about the hot babes but the animation just blew me away after a steady diet of Simpsons (Sorry Mr. Groening). The best part, facial expressions. Recommend multiple viewings with some cool tunes, good friends and a couple of cold ones!

Forget "Wizards", this is the best Ralph Bakshi ever has given! Using Frank Frazetta's characters and art, he created this beautiful and stunning epic that has more life and interest than any other movie he has done. Wheras "Wizards" just is confusing and way too cartoonish to be taken seriously, "Fire and Ice" never shows any humor or cartoonish elements. It is simply a straight foward and to-the-point action cartoon. It also is a bit deeper and interesting than most of the other "sword and sorcery" movies in the 80s. Definately recommended!!!!

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...