|
|
 - Not to badIt took me 25 years before I finally got around to looking at this cult classic. And while its not the greatest thing story wise. The animation is top notch. I guess it's unfortunate that we couldn't have had more work from the Bakshi/Frazetta team. Oh if I could just relive the early 80's. Rating:  - Teenage nostalgia does not age well.Fire and Ice (Ralph Bakshi, 1983) Sometimes I wonder what on earth filmmakers were thinking when they made movies. More often, I wonder what I was thinking when I was enthralled with them. In this case, though, I don't need to do either--when Fire and Ice came out, I was fourteen years old, male, and not terribly experienced with the opposite sex--in other words, I was Ralph Bakshi's exact target audience. Now I'm thirty-eight, married, and have a more encyclopedic knowledge of eighties and nineties exploitation cinema (read: porn) than I'm sure anyone in my family would like to acknowledge; rewatching Fire and Ice these days, I look back and grieve that my fourteen-year-old self had such bad taste. (But then, in 1983, my all-time favorite movie was Deathsport. No, I can't explain it either.) Fire and Ice, which All-Movie Guide calls "Bakshi's last stab at epic fantasy", concerns two kingdoms, the established human kingdom ruled by fire, and the upstart kingdom of outcasts and half-breeds, the kingdom of Ice. Needless to say, one is wise and good, and the other is twisted and evil. Interestingly, there are a few places in the script where denizens of either kingdom could waver from their one-dimensionality and suddenly bring depth and richness to the script; we're dangling there waiting for Bakshi to drop the apple into our mouths, but of course it's snatched away as quickly as it's offered. Cruel, I tell you. But then, no one's supposed to be paying attention to the script; we're supposed to be too busy, erm, "watching" Tigre (voice of Cynthia Leake), who starts the movie wearing something that looks as if it's supposed to be a diaphanous lavender negligee over a couple of pieces of filmy stuff that pass as underwear. But only for the first third of the movie, after which the negligee-thing goes away. Draw some luscious, and entirely unrealistic, curves, and the audience's collective brain will be interested in nothing else; at least, this seems to have been the thinking behind this production. (Add in a cameo from Batman--and I swear, the character looks like the ancestor of the animated version of Batman from the seventies--and you'll kill off the last few collective brain cells still struggling to recover from the onslaught of Tigre-flesh.) But the worst part is that, after realizing all this, I still sat through the entire eighty-one minutes this weekend. I'm pretty sure I didn't drool, but there may be some extra gaps in the gray matter I should probably have my doctor take a look at. * Rating:  - Slow moving rotoscoped animationThe storyline for this movie was interesting, but took so long to get moving I started to lose interest. If it was a one-hour movie, it probably would have been more entertaining. The Big Bad Evil Ice Guy is attempting to conquer the Good Guy Fire King, but most of the time is spent with the Fire King's scantily clad, fantasy-proportioned princess running from ape-like soldiers and being rescued over-and-over by a sole-surviving warrior from one of her father/king's tribes. It all wraps up very quickly in the end. If you like Frazzetta, then you'll notice this is a whole movie of his paintings in rotoscoped animation. Rating:  - Action Packed Fantasy Fun!If you liked Conan the Barbarian or even Thundarr the Barbarian you'll like this movie. Rating:  - One of my all-time favorites. A real gem of a film.I highly recommend this title to anyone who likes films in the fantasy genre. Even after all these years I still enjoy watching this film for what could probably be the 100th time. The animation techniques were very innovative for the time. The storyline is compelling and the characters are fascinating. This is one DVD that I am very happy to have been able to get my hands on and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something unique and special.
|
