Fire and Ice (1983) Review

Fire and Ice (1983) Review

It's been while since i've done a review that is exclusively written one instead of a video review (which is my jam still). So i recently took a bit deeper dive into work of Ralph Bakshi whose known from The Lord Of the Rings animated movie among Wizards. You could say hes best known from doing lot more adult type of animation movies that were quite liberal in their day and breaking bit of boundaries what can be done with animation in general on the big screen.

I Still have yet to watch most of his movies, but i'm going to review them eventually on my channel and maybe ill write even article about this guy later on too. But alas we gonna talk about Fire and Ice today a fantasy movie akin to Conan the Barbarian.

From their citadel Icepeak, the evil Queen Juliana (Eileen O'Neill) and her son Prince Nekron (Stephen Mendel) send forth a wave of glaciers; this forces humanity to retreat south towards the equator. Nekron sends a delegation to Firekeep, the citadel of King Jarol (Leo Gordon); ostensibly, this is to request the King's surrender. In truth, the Ice Queen has orchestrated it as a ruse so that her sub-human troops can abduct Jarol's beautiful daughter, Princess Teegra (Cynthia Leake). Juliana feels that Nekron should take a bride to produce an heir. However, the Ice Prince is incensed because he abhors the notion of peace; Nekron declines to marry Teegra, in spite of his mother's plan, but keeps the Fire Princess as a hostage. ~ wikipedia

So the very premise of the movie ice vs fire is something that you can do a lot with, but movie ultimately doesn't create this amazing premise around the setting. There is just 2 factions which are quite quickly introduced and there isn't much lore behind or history between these factions. Suddenly Princess Keegra is snatched from Firekeep by mongoloid looking half apes and manages to escape at one point and meets up with protagonist Larn, who has no background story whatsoever and we don't really understand his motives...

On other side we got the mad incel king of Ice whose also just super generic villain, who wants to enslave people i guess and wants to capture keegra even though he doesn't really have that much interest on her. Then there is this mysterious Darkwolf who looks like Rexxar (Warcraft Character) who wants to kill the Ice king Nekron (no context really given here either).

I really don't want to talk about the premise and plot any longer because its just quite bad honestly. Musically its pretty non-existant too and i have nothing positive/negative to talk about there, it was just forgettable. However voice actor performances were decent i suppose and nothing too cringe happened in my view.

Highlight of the movie is just the visuals, at times the backgrounds were very well drawn and rota-scoping technique was pleasant to look at for most part. That's not enough to compensate for every other lacking part of this movie however.

Good Stuff

• Rota-scoping style did look pretty great most of the film

Bad Stuff

• The plot was quite horrendous
• no proper background stories to major characters in the movie
• Nothing positive add about soundtrack
• No deep messages or meaning to the movie