Animation Watch: Fire & Ice (1983)

Watched:  08/18/2024

Format:  BluRay from Austin Public

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ralph Bakshi

This was the weekend for watching movies I considered viewing during COVID lockdown but never got to.  Certainly Gymkata was part of that, but I'd also bookmarked the 1983 animated adventure film Fire & Ice.  

Ralph Bakshi is a figure that I think those in the know were still discussing in the 1990's, but I'm not sure anyone under 40 in 2024 is really aware of Bakshi, his work or what should have been his legacy.  I'll leave you to Google the man, but he burst out of the counter-culture scene, partnering with R. Crumb and making animated features that were decidedly not all-ages.  His films were famously oversexed, and in the US, our relationship with sexualization battles between raw objectification, cartoonish piety, artistic vision and feminist criticism - leaving Bakshi an unapologetic provocateur.

But he also was trying to make art.  And as such, pushed boundaries and envelopes.  His work used familiar imagery, just off kilter enough to look like part of what you may see in other, more sanitized and popular work, but maybe what was happening in other parts of Toon Town where Mickey would never go.  But his interests also strayed into what one could do with music and image (as all animators get to), and an interest in what animation had the potential to do that live action was not capable of for high fantasy.

For Fire & Ice, Bakshi assembled a team that would make any self-respecting nerd salute.  He partnered with famed fantasy artist Frank Frazetta to design characters and a world, got a script by Marvel stalwarts of the Bronze Age, Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas - who both worked on the Marvel Conan magazine and comics.  And his background artists were Thomas Kinkade (yeah, that Thomas Kinkade) and the guy who did the 1990's cult-favorite fantasy art books, Dinotopia.  He had the creator of Aeon Flux on staff as a key animator.

The reviews of Fire & Ice upon release were unkind, but in context, cultural critics were obligated to be sniffy about anything in the fantasy or sci-fi realm.  Reading the quotes about the film seeming as if it were pulled from a comic book were, in the early 1980's, an absolute dig at the film, not the basic observation it reads as in 2024.  But the fact is:  it really was pulled from comics.  Hiring Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway was not a mistake.  Before he created iconic fantasy paintings in oils, Frank Frazetta worked in comics - back when a key idea for anatomy and the manipulation of the human ideal was the game in an Alex Raymond/ Burne Hogarth world. Lurid fantasy book covers were not for the serious mind in a tweedier era into which this was released.

 All that to say - the story of the film itself is classic Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard pulp.  It's mad wizards threatening the world with the inhuman hordes and dark magics.  A shirtless, muscley hero who is mostly defined by his willingness to swing a sword and walk into battle.  A scantily clad princess in need of saving, who manages to get recaptured ad infinitum (saw what you will about Princess Peach, but she manages to get kidnapped just once per episode).  This film has a secondary hero, inserting a Conan-like character in the form of Darkwolf, a play on Frazetta's "Deathdealer" character, but re-imagined as a wolf-skin wearing barbarian rather than an armored dark knight, so we get both our sort of Han and Luke in the eager young hero and the more jaded guy (who, actually, just seem to relish swinging an axe at dudes).

As a story, it's paper thin.  But the story is the framework for hanging the art and animation. 

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, the 1980's saw a boom in barbarian-type media, kicked off by Beastmaster and Conan: The Barbarian.  It's possible that Marvel's Conan and John Carter comics in the 1970's helped fuel that fire.  What Bakshi rightfully noted was that the worlds of fantasy novels were super difficult to bring to screen.  You could put a body builder in a bear skin diaper, but he couldn't act, and that was clearly a hillside on one of LA's many ranches used for outdoor locations.  Where were the swamps filled with ruins and red skies?  Where were the icy peaks littered with monster-men and cities built on the side of a volcano?  Instead, we get day players in robes borrowed from costume shops and a Jazzercise instructor shoved into a leather bra.

If nothing else, what Bakshi and team brought to life was a middle-tier fantasy, animated with rotoscoping to ground the characters against strange, surreal environs.  The sort of thing we now dump $150 million on for CGI backgrounds instead of a pair of talented painters knocking out backgrounds at Bob Ross speeds.  It's impossible to communicate to the kids how we made movies in the long, long ago and make them understand that the process was:

• film the action with live actors
• blow each frame up to an animation cell size on acetate to you can put it on a lightboard
• use the image of the actors to draw the fantasy figures using the bodies of the actors as your model
• repeat thousands and thousands of times
• photocopy the drawings onto cells
• create 
• paint the cells
• rephotograph the cells over background paintings

That doesn't include things like lip-synch or other tricks of the trade.  Animation is *hard*, whether you're animating rotoscoped models running across a bridge or lighting a heavenly void just so for Soul.  I appreciate the craft of film on all levels, but I'm in constant awe of the work done for all sorts of animation.  

As a story, Fire & Ice has some sort of stock characters not just as our leads, but the supporting characters are perhaps more one or two-dimensional.  And, you know, for an 80 minute movie, okay.  But within that time, the movie can feel repetitive because there's so little going on and they make choices like "hey, keep kidnapping the princess."  There's, perhaps, one side-quest featuring a witch and her troglodyte son, which I found a bit of a distraction.  Maybe if the world felt more populated and we had multiple interactions of this type, but it feels like pausing a car race to watch the driver stop off and talk to the lady running the hot dog stand.

That said - it *does* have some great animation, so I'm not super mad about it.  It's just that in a fairly lean and clean narrative, the sequence comes and goes with minimal narrative impact and I feel like it was supposed to be important but got trimmed down to what we got.

We can't not talk about the designs by Frazetta.  And, yes, the men are 5% body fat muscle men, and our females are all Frazetta buxom.  To see that animated is, I will be honest, one of the horniest things I've ever seen and led to Jamie and I just laughing when our heroine first appears, stretching and posing on a chaise lounge.  It's amazing animation, and they had to add some curves to the already considerable model used in order to match Frazetta-ish proportions, but good golly - you can never accuse Bakshi of not being direct.

This is the 1980's, and so there's some coding I think would get changed up in the modern film vernacular.  It's fine to have orcs or ogres or whatever, but the characters in this film hew more human, and so it can feel like there's some racial stuff baked in that was likely never intended, but it takes the barest thought to see it that way.  And, after all, the film lists those characters as "Sub-Humans" which...  yeah, that was probably not meant the way it sounds now.  But I want to give them the benefit of the doubt? In the 1980's, we were still defaulting to "White Male" when we said "our hero", and that is just some cultural legacy stuff that's going to show up in media.

I can only imagine the mixed feelings by these filmmakers when Conan the Barbarian dropped in 1982.  Despite what I see some folks saying online, there's no way that Fire & Ice was launched due to the success of that film, though it's like Frazetta was well aware of the movie - having painted numerous Conan images that helped keep the idea of the character alive.  So it's possible that, on the periphery, Frazetta told Bakshi this was coming and they could follow Conan, offering more than what live action could at the time.

Watching the film, I still get some of the same old thrills of a good pulpy adventure with men of action and very bad men worth slaying.  Throw in a love interest with some grit, and I'm easy to please.  But, man, the art that went into making this was incredible.  The expressions caught, the angles and character... and, yeah, the world created is stunning.  We're maybe too used to Disney being able to throw money at the problem - and Bakshi didn't have that luxury, and yet...  

We'll insist Frazetta's art is now somehow outside of the cultural norm, but mostly I think we know enough not to hang images of Dejah Thoris in our living rooms or put the Egyptian Princess image on the side of our van.  And I think we're always just one good fantasy adaptation away from showing that folks aren't that mad about shirtless swordsmen fighting an army of orcs.  Maybe the script isn't great* and that doesn't help things.  And, sure, this sort of thing isn't for *everyone*.   But I'm gonna wish I could swap out the soundtrack for some Led Zeppelin, and just enjoy this thing.

*we're in a rare historical moment where it's okay to pile on Roy Thomas