Sorry, this movie sucks

hyped garbage

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Watched this many times in mid-80s. Turns up on Tubi for free viewing.

FIRE AND ICE is an animated sword and sorcery epic from director Ralph Bakshi, and as a film it's a real treat to watch. This movie features unheralded realistic animation of the main characters, achieved by a motion capture process in which real actors were used to capture the movements of the figures, then transformed into 2D drawings. It's very similar to the motion capture used for modern day CGI, but to my mind it's even more effective than that.The story is a good mix of CONAN THE BARBARIAN style heroic action with QUEST FOR FIRE-style setting and backdrop. The hand-drawn mountains are quite lovely to behold, while the central figures are lithe and realistic, reminiscent of the art of Boris Vallejo. The character of Teegra, for instance, would have delighted any teenage male viewer in terms of her voluptuous realism. The voice work is adequate. The action is intense and visceral, and the bad guys are suitably imposing, with one of them impressive enough to influence cinema until this day (check out HARDCORE HENRY if you don't believe me). Altogether this is a fine experience, and something of an instant favourite of mine.

At the rate things are going, animation rebel Ralph Bakshi may never produce another full-length animated feature, and in this regard, FIRE AND ICE may be the last hurrah for his style of visual storytelling (unless you're a fan of COOL WORLD). It's a striking movie that belongs to a bygone era of experimentation in feature animation, and it's quite deserving of its cult following. It's also a flawed film that loses a little with each viewing, at least in my experience. Bakshi die-hards and animation disciples will probably want to check this one out, but casual viewers will probably have a tougher time being engaged.The story: In a showdown between the kingdoms of ice and fire, a kidnapped princess (voiced by Maggie Roswell) and the lone survivor of a massacred village (William Ostrander) find themselves on a path to dispose of the evil ice lord (Stephen Mendell).Almost any fantasy fan will be able to tell at a glance that the film's visual style is an animated realization of the work of artist Frank Frazetta. To help achieve this feat, Bakshi uses rotoscoping to grand effect. The animation is a lot less awkward than his previous attempts to animate entire casts this way, and it even helps bolster the tone of the film more than once. There are lengthy sequences that go on without dialogue, and these scenes remain engaging through masterfully-rendered body language and facial expressions. This helps enliven the numerous action scenes as well, many of which are heightened by the inclusion of some equally well-rendered beasts and monsters.Nevertheless, the amplitude of adrenaline scenes helps illustrate the movie's major weakness: its story. The filmmakers seem more concerned with simply animating cool things than crafting a fully-rounded tale or building the relationships between characters. Removing the scenes which do not actually advance the plot would probably chop the runtime down to a little less than half its current 81-minute length, and this bulky amount of padding becomes more obvious every time you watch the film. Without exception, the characters are one-dimensional and undergo little development – making the movie less dramatically mature than many modern video games.Bakshi's stylistic choices make it hard not to also examine the movie in a social context, and it's pretty eclectic. For one thing, adherence to the Frazetta style makes this one of the few fantasy flicks I've seen wherein the male characters are almost as sexualized as the females, give the minimalist wardrobe. Hero Larn finds himself in need of rescue several times, and despite the ceaseless efforts of the screenplay to turn her into a damsel, heroine Teegra is a pretty resourceful character. Other depictions are less progressive, though. Ice lord Nekron is pretty unambiguously gay, but his implied homosexuality – specifically, the fact that he finds Teegra undesirable – is presented as an evil attribute. And what can be said about the dark-skinned, animalistic "subhumanoids" other than an acknowledgement of how clearly fantasy often caters to exclusively white audiences?Despite these shortcomings, it's hard to deny the movie's energy and uniqueness. Finding an animated fantasy film of this one's ambition that was produced in the west is still something of an Easter egg hunt – let's face it, there's a good chance that you happened upon this page by chance – and of the handful of ones that you could pick from, you could do worse than FIRE AND ICE. It's a fun adventure, and while I would not recommend an outright purchase, I would suggest that you afford yourself the chance that there's something here you enjoy and give it a rental.

I first saw this when I was around 7. I remembered what I believed to be a vague outline of what took place. Turns out now, 15 years later, that I remembered everything with great accuracy because it seems the writers never got beyond making an outline to the story. There is no plot to this movie/cartoon. There is no character development, no back story, no character arcs, nothing. The good guys do things because they are good, while the bad guys do things solely because they are bad. One unintentionally hilarious part is when someone who you would think to be important dies and nobody cares in the least. They just shrug their shoulders and move on. There's barely any dialogue either. If you cut out the fight scenes and the running scenes, you lose 70% of the movie.Watch this because you want to see some good animation and for no other reason. Or if you like to look at scantily clad hot cartoon chicks (or scantily clad hot cartoon dudes).