Ralph Bakshi’s film Fire & Ice (1983) came out at the height of popularity for the fantasy film genre. Bakshi, realizing the limitations of special effects of the day, seized the opportunity to make an animated feature that would realize the most fantastical elements of the genre. Bakshi’s previous fantasy outing, The Lord Of The Rings (1978), had been a flop but it proved that Bakshi’s trademark rotoscoping techniques could deliver a cinematographic adventure as imaginative as any comic book panel.
It was to that end that Bakshi enlisted the legendary Frank Frazetta to co-design the characters and locations seen in Fire & Ice. Likewise the script was penned by Marvel comics veterans Roy Thomas (of Dr. Strange fame) and Gerry Conway (who co-created The Punisher). Fire & Ice looks like the art of Frazetta come to life while the plot is pure adventure comic. To this day no artist is as closely associated with the fantasy genre as Frazetta and Fire & Ice remains the ultimate filmic expression of that aesthetic.
But for all of the breathtaking designs and gorgeous animation in Fire & Ice the film itself feels like little more than a single issue of Vicente Segrelles’ The Mercenary. The limitation of the Sword and Sorcery fantasy films of the eighties is that so few of those films varied their narrative or attempted to askew the plethora of familiar narrative tropes. Fire & Ice may be the most authentic looking film of this cycle in terms of capturing the popular imagination of what the genre is, but it fails to do anything truly innovative with regards to plot.
Sex, violence, monsters, and bare chested heroes crowd the fantasy genre of the period and Fire & Ice is no different. A film like Lucio Fulci’s Conquest (1983) pushed these genre elements to the point of excess creating a kind of reflexive nexus around its familiar plot while Bakshi’s film simply reaffirms a formula that has already been proven and played out. The most interesting aspect of Bakshi’s film is that by animating Frazetta’s designs he actually ends up revealing their inherent plasticity as a lexicon of genre signifiers.
The design of the character Teegra is the best example of this phenomenon. Teegra, wearing only the skimpiest of string-bikinis, would not seem at all out of place in one of Frazetta’s oil paintings. But the second that Bakshi puts Teegra into motion the viewer’s awareness of the plasticity of this popular aesthetic becomes ten fold. Fire & Ice may possess a remarkable fidelity to Frazetta’s work, but that fidelity only confirms and reiterates that Frazetta’s art is the articulation of a very specific heterosexual male sex dream.
However, Frazetta’s brand of straight male sex fantasies was and is an immensely popular one. It isn’t a fault that Fire & Ice should revel in that fetishism. On the contrary, Bakshi’s animations all trade in some form of fetishized cultural currency. Frazetta’s illustrations and the film Fire & Ice came to define how a generation of Dungeons & Dragons players imagined their fantasy role playing in action (myself included). The fantasies of Frank Frazetta became a kind of participatory exercise for players and audiences alike. Bakshi’s Fire & Ice attempted to and succeeded at widening that sphere of influence.
