Reeling Backward: "Fire and Ice"

Teegra encounters Otwa

"Fire and Ice" has more cheek than redeeming qualities.

This 1983 fantasy cartoon from director Ralph Bakshi and producer/illustrator Frank Frazetti received a PG rating from the MPAA despite being a virtual non-stop parade of nearly-bare butts and breasts. It's basically "Heavy Metal" with less blood and a thin sheen of material to cover up the good stuff.

It's one areola away from adulthood.

The movie has a lot of cool elements, but is still just a half-step above total garbage. The animation detail is pure Saturday morning cartoon quality, and some of the voice work is not much better. It's 81 minutes long but feels like it could easily lose 20 by excising the overlong shots of people running here or there.

And "Fire and Ice" goes into an excessive amount of unnecessary slo-mo, particularly as the camera leeringly lingers over female bodies in a way that seems designed to be juuuuuust palatable fare for 12-year-old boys.

The film combines elements of both "low" and "high" fantasy -- the former being more closely aligned with Conan and his ilk and the latter with hobbits. When you say high fantasy, think kings and wizards and powerful magic and world-ending stories. Low fantasy is more like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with bloodier quests for individual glory.

There was a brief heyday of fantasy movies in the late 1970s and early '80s, including some pretty gory fare with "Conan the Barbarian," "Excalibur," "Heavy Metal" and so on. As I've previously opined, I think the roots of its destruction were sown when they tried to extend fantasy filmmaking into family-friendly spheres.

Movies like 1982's "Beastmaster" skirted right along the hard edge of the PG rating, with plenty of blood and even (brief) bare breasts. "Fire and Ice" is close in line with that aesthetic, with lots of bloodless deaths and a female lead who spends most of the movie essentially nude.

Written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, the story setting is a prehistoric world where everyone wears fur loincloths, and that's about it. They wield knives and spears and other basic weapons, though a few of the more advanced people have swords and axes.

There appears to be two tribes of people, the subhuman minions of the evil lord and the slightly more upright free folk; think Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Adding to the implicit racial discomfort, the "good" people all have brightly Caucasian skin while the subhumans are drawn in distinctly duskier tones, with somewhat indistinct/generic facial features.

As he had with his "Lord of the Rings" movie, Bakshi opted to film much of the movie in live action and then transfer it to animation through a process called rotoscoping, where artists trace over the figures frame by frame. The idea is to capture a more naturalistic movement than free-form animation, but in my opinion it usually doesn't work very well.

Bakshi often had separate actors perform the live action and voice parts, including all three leads: the young, untried warrior Larn (voice by William Ostrander, action by Randy Norton); Teegra (Maggie Roswell and Cynthia Leake), the T&A princess/damsel in distress; and Nekron (Stephen Mendel, Sean Hannon), the powerful sorcerer and villain.

The land is divided between the frozen mountainous north and jungle-ish south kingdoms, with their headquarters in Icepeak and Firekeep, respectively. Nekron is using his powers to slowly advance his glacier over the land, and demands that the fire king, Jarol (Leo Gordon), subjugate himself completely. He refuses, and Teegra, his daughter, is kidnapped as blackmail.

The power dynamic up north is curious. Nekron is represented as a fairly common archetype in fantasy: the albino-ish weakling who harnesses great unnatural powers. He goes into a sort of rolled-eyes palsy whenever he is exerting himself magically.

Nekron is the son of another magic-user, Juliana (voiced by Susan Tyrrell, who also provides the narration), who taught him his arts only to be surpassed by him. They have a contentious relationship, with her supporting his imperialist ambitions but working to manipulate him.

For example, it is her idea to kidnap Teegra to offer her as a bride to Nekron. He haughtily refuses, even expressing disgust at her appearance which, along with some not-terribly-subtle swishiness in his mannerisms, points to other proclivities.

Though physically scrawny compared to other prehistoric males, Nekron enjoys personally dueling his enemies, using his magic to halt their blows or crush their bodies.

The running time of the movie is largely taken up with what I refer to as "process" storytelling. It puts an emphasis on slavishly following every step along the way of a journey or undertaking rather than giving us the highlights.

For example, when Larn is scaling the side of a mountain, rather than just showing him starting, a couple shots a long the way, maybe he nearly slips one time and then he's at the top, "Fire and Ice" will show us the whole, boring ascent.

So it ends up feeling like we're watching a bunch of dull, time-filling footage. It's also used for a lot of shots of Teegra, who initially wears a flimsy bit of cloth on her upper and lower body that is torn away by the subhumans. Underneath is comically tiny thong underwear and two triangles of cloth that just cover her nipples.

It's a triumvirate display of cleavage, sideboob and underboob.

Teegra writhes and stretches prodigiously to show off her assets. She also has the most hilarious running style I've ever seen, with virtually no arm pumping at all. She keeps her hands slightly in front of her and out to the sides -- as if to ward off any chance of her bosom being momentarily blocked from view.

William Ostrander plays Taro (voice and action), the princeling son of Jarol who is sent by his father to negotiate with Nekron for Teegra's release, with the full knowledge this will result in his certain demise. When informed of his son's death, Jarol has virtually no reaction at all, which makes him seem almost as hard-hearted as his nemesis.

Elizabeth Lloyd Shaw (voice and action) plays Roleil, a witch living in the woods who briefly captures Teegra. She has a giant, dimwitted servant named Otwa (Micky Morton), and it seems like the start of an interesting side plot until they're both slain by Nekron's minions a few minutes after meeting them. The "sexy witch interlude" is another hallmark of low fantasy.

Entering the story fairly late in the game is the mysterious figure of Darkwolf (Steve Sandor, voice and action), the mightiest warrior in the land. He stumbles across Larn after his village is destroyed and becomes a sort of mentor/protector figure, without ever saying very much. Darkwolf wields a two-bladed battle ax and wears a wolfskin headdress with glowing green eyes. He's also the only character who doesn't have his ass hanging out the entire time.

Darkwolf seems quite consciously to be a ripoff of Conan, and indeed it's he who has the final faceoff with Nekron, not Jarol or Larn. In his last shot he's seen slouched over a horse holding his ax in clear imitation of a famous painting Franzetti did that later became the cover for the debut album of Molly Hatchet.

It's worthwhile to note that in the end, the heroics of Larn and Teegra and Darkwolf are all for naught. All along King Jarol has a plan to release the massive river of lava he keeps dammed up within his keep and use it to utterly destroy Icepeak. He only delays doing this while his children are in the northern domain (and presumably for hesitation to destroy all the lush land in between).

In this sense, the fire king never truly feared the icy invasion as he knew he had the equivalent of a nuclear bomb in his pocket.

A couple of other notable sequences: Jarol has a small force of "dragonhawks," which resemble pterodactyls, which are ridden by his elite warriors. Larn and Darkwolf use them to infiltrate Icepeak for the final showdown with Nekron, and most of them are killed.

I also loved the brief scene where Larn encounters a graveyard spirit who lends him assistance when she learns he seeks vengeance on Nekron, who slew her and the rest of her village. She has a mostly skeleton head with a few wisps of long hair and some flesh still covering her upper torso, and there's a vaguely flirty air about her interactions.

It reminded me of the interrogation of a half-corpse in "The Return of the Living Dead," one of my favorite horror movies.

I had hopes for a little light necrophilia but, like the witch interlude, this communing is over just when it gets interesting.

"Fire and Ice" had a budget of about $3 million in today's dollars, so it was a pretty low-rent affair. That's reflected in the slapdash-looking animation with very little shading or texture. Larn in particular looks like he could've leaped right out of a newspaper comic strip.

Contrast the bland look of the film with its awesome poster, which looks like the cover of a Conan novel with a bit of anime style thrown in. What if the whole movie had looked like that instead of a lame Johnny Quest cartoon, I couldn't help but wonder.

Plans were laid for Robert Rodriguez to remake "Fire and Ice," with Bakshi's blessing but not his involvement. But nothing has emerged in the last six years.

'The fading of magic into mythology' is perhaps the most pervasive theme in fantasy storytelling. My only hope is that the future of fantasy cinema doesn't follow this as well. We had a brief golden age in the early '80s and early 2000s, with some trashier efforts along the way.

It's time for this genre to be brought back from the dead, for good.

Reeling Backward: "Fritz the Cat" (1972)

Some movies became iconic in such a way that nearly everyone is familiar with a film without actually having seen it. That had been my experience with "Fritz the Cat."

From the standpoint of content that pushed the envelope, 1968 to 1975 or so were very interesting years for American cinema. In less then a decade we went from movies being seen as more or less suitable for all ages to having films that were very intentionally made for adult audiences only.

"Fritz the Cat" is most remembered today for being the first animated film to receive an X rating from the MPAA. It features a lot of animals with anthropomorphic genitals, breasts and asses. There's a fair bit of sex -- more groping and tugging than humping, notably -- drug use and some fairly grisly violence.

Interestingly, "Fritz" hit U.S. theaters about six months before "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door," the two films that largely ushered in the era of mainstream pornographic movies. One wonders if having a movie come first doing basically the same stuff with cartoon critters helped ease the transition to acceptability.

I'm not sure if it's a great movie, but it sure is a bizarre and energetically original one. I was struck by the contrast of "just effing around" fun scenes with a lot of pretty biting sociopolitical commentary. Overall it's quite critical of the hippie/free love/revolutionary movements of the 1960s, reveling in the debauchery of their antics while attacking the nihilism that often hid behind a shroud of passion.

In a lot of ways, it would not be surprising to see "Fritz the Cat" labeled as reactionary by the standards of today's culture of hyper-tribalism.

"Fritz" is the sort of movie that makes fun of both counterculture youngsters and their sworn enemy, the police -- portrayed as, literally and not terribly imaginatively, lunkheaded pigs.

There are really only four classes of animals in the movie: the porcine, violent LEOs; the jivin' black crows, who are stand-ins for African-Americans (or Afro Americans, as they would've been called then); the violent anarchists, who are reptilian or have squid-like tentacles hidden under trenchcoats; and all the other commonplace mammals, who represent "normal" white society, or at least the weed-smoking faction of it.

Tellingly, there is a complete absence of the standard American family life. We never see any suburbs, and hardly any kids or elderly people. Rather than standing outside regular society, the denizens of this crooked crackpot world are all that there is.

Fritz (voice of Skip Hinnant) is an NYU student who is totally focused on getting high and getting laid. He has been all around the world, he says -- though not much beyond Washington Square Park, it would seem -- 'fought many a good man and laid many a good woman.'

Fritz of course was the creation of underground comics legend R. Crumb, who had to be convinced by writer/director Ralph Bakshi to sign over the rights. In fact, he never actually did, but his wife had power of attorney and sold Fritz to Bakshi for $50,000 plus a cut of the profits.

Crumb did not care for the finished film, disliking Hinnant's voice and seeing it as more Bakshi's creation than a reflection of his comics. "There's something really repressed about it," Crumb said of the film, and he promptly responded to its release by publishing a comic in which Fritz is messily killed, and never used the character again.

At a brisk 78 minutes, "Fritz the Cat" really has a just few story elements to it. In the opening sequence he convinces a trio of hippie girls to come back to a friend's apartment for a consciousness-raising session, which of course is just a cover for getting it on.

Fritz was hoping for a one-on-one with the thickest girl, but it becomes a four-way and then, to his disdain as the drugged-up denizens invade the bathroom, an outright orgy. This is broken up by the pig cops, making Fritz a wanted feline.

On the lam he makes his way to Harlem, befriending a cool old pool shark named Duke (Charles Spidar) who saves his bacon in a crows-only bar. They steal and crash a car, take haven with a drug dealer, Big Bertha (Rosetta LeNoire), who gets Fritz high and has sex with him. Zoinked out on Bertha's high-potency marijuana, Fritz decides mid-coitus that he must devote himself to revolution, starting a race riot in which Duke is shot to death by the police.

In the last bit Fritz decides to run away from his life in New York City and resolves to drive out to San Francisco -- mirroring Crumb's own real life -- along with his hectoring former/future girlfriend, Winston Schwartz (Judy Engles). Fritz ditches her and falls in with Blue (John McCurry), a strung-out bunny biker and his busty horse girlfriend, Harriet (Mary Dean). They introduce him to some revolutionaries who enlist Fritz to blow up a power plant, which ends with a bang.

I liked how all the animals, from birds to lizards to mammals of every description, are completely compatible sexually. Bakshi and his team of animators don't show any penetration or hard dicks, but pretty much everything else. All the female creatures have bounteous, bouncing boobs that are  flounced about soon after meeting them.

I think Winston, as the designated buzzkill, is the only girl who never gets naked.

The gender dynamics, reflective of nearly 50 years ago, are what they call "problematic" today. There's no denying a strong vein of misogyny underneath all the adoration of the female form. Winston, as seemingly the only woman with a brain, is derided and abandoned. Bertha has agency and is firmly in control of her fling with Fritz, though her physical and vocal depiction dallies somewhere between mocking racist tropes and diving into the deep end with them.

The poor figure of Harriet is deeply troubling. When she objects to the revolutionaries' plans, Blue beats the hell out of her with a length of chain, though she seems to possess superhuman (or super-equine) toughness. She displays maximum defiance and (it's heavily implied) gets gang-raped as punishment.

Even with an X-rating, Bakshi thankfully does not depict that.

The female bodies seem to reflect Crumb's fetish for a particular type: chubby, thick-waisted with outsized breasts and a voluminous bottom. In a lot of ways his kink predated today's favored Kim Kardashian look by several decades.

The film has a number of musical sections, with existing tunes by various artists along with original songs "Winston" and "You're the Only Girl (I Ever Loved)." I was also struck by a couple of transitional sections that switch to animated stills of real New York City photographs, including a poignant one depicting all the trash and squalor around Harlem.

"Fritz the Cat" became part of the midnight movie scene of the 1970s and '80s, meaning a lot of people watched it with pharmacological companionship. I can see how it's viewed as a trippy flick that's wild and goofy.

But there's a lot more to the movie than just X-rated hijinks. It stands as a notable time capsule for its era, as the anger and passion of the anti-war movement cooled into irony and cynicism.

It's one of the earliest movies to look back on the '60s with something like regret, or at least sober-eyed reassessment. It depicts the contemporary urban setting (accurately) as a morass of filth, violence, hard drugs and racial division.

It made a boatload of money on a tiny production budget -- there's some disagreement about exactly how much, but $90 million is the figure most commonly batted around. There was a 1974 sequel, "The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat," that also featured the voice of Hinnant but neither Bakshi or Crumb were involved.

Ironically, it received the tamer R rating, becoming the first animated film to receive that designation in an odd historical one-two punch.

Bakshi was somewhat bothered by garnering the label of the "dirty cartoon" guy, which was underscored by his next film, "Heavy Traffic," also getting an X-rating and the R-rated "Coonskin" attacked as racially exploitative.

He went on to become the king of indie animation, working in collaboration with or apart from studios on seminal movies like "Wizards," "Cool World" and the well-intentioned-but-ill-fated "The Lord of the Rings." Many of the artists who helped launch the second golden age of animation were inspired by Bakshi.

Fritz may have been little more than a horndog cat, but he still made history.

Reeling Backward: "Wizards" (1977)

Having recently reviewed Ralph Bakshi's "The Lord of the Rings" for its Blu-ray release, I thought I'd go a little deeper into his oeuvre to see if I could figure out why his style seemed so ill-suited to adapting Tolkien's masterwork.

I saw "Fritz the Cat" years ago -- so long I barely remember it. Ditto for "Wizards," made in 1977, the year immediately before "LOTR." Wizards has a lot of thematic similarities to "LOTR" -- an ancient world of faerie magic in which the forces of good and evil battle for final dominion over all the land.

It's probably no surprise, then, that I was also disappointed while re-watching "Wizards." Actually, I fracking hated the thing. And I think I figured out why I'm not a Bakshiite.

Ralph Bakshi did not make animated films. He made cartoons.

I'm not trying to be dismissive here. Many of my favorite films are cartoons. You don't even have to be animated to be one. "Kick-Ass," given a very favorable review by me, is explicitly and joyously a cartoon.

Nothing wrong with being a cartoon. The problem comes in that Bakshi approaches material that would better be served by being taken seriously in a way that is unserious, flip and ... well, cartoonish.

Let me define my terms. To me, a cartoon is something that doesn't take its subject at face value. Everything it presents is on some level being ridiculed or undermined. Even Bugs Bunny got his comeuppance from time to time. If a cartoon shows you a noble hero on a quest to save a damsel, you know he's going to do something silly before long.

It's pretty obvious why I -- and most fans of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" -- didn't like this sensibility applied to a world and characters that we so cherished. But I think it ends up ruining "Wizards" as well.

"Wizards" opens with a prologue that presents a world (ours) destroyed by nuclear holocaust. Millions of years later, the Eath is occupied by mutants and faerie creatures. The leaders of the two opposing factions are great wizards, brothers who despise each other: Avatar and Blackwolf.

(With names like that, I don't think I need bother saying which is evil and which is good.)

Now, with a premise like that, you're expecting some pretty grim stuff. But the film opens with Bakshi's trademark puckish humor, cutesy depictions of faeries, and a whole lot of cornball action.

When I first laid eyes on Avatar the Old, I wanted to throw up. He has aged into a diminutive figure who wears clownish robes over his pudge-pot torso and a conical wizard hat complete with a star. He has a bulbous red nose, a long beard that hides his face entirely, and goes about barefoot. He's constantly tugging on a stogie that he clutches between his toes. As voiced by veteran voice actor Bob Holt, Avatar talks in a world-weary growl and distinctly Northeastern accent.

So after that great build-up about a post-apocalyptic world filled with beauty and horror, our guide in this journey is basically Mr. Magoo's grumpy cousin from Brooklyn.

Things get worse from there. Avatar doesn't do much magic these days, and has hired himself out to the president of the good kingdom to instruct his daughter, Elinore, on how to become a full-fledged fairy. Right now she's only about halfway there. (Why a fairy born with wings has to be trained to be one is beyond me.)

Necron 99, a red robot sent by Blackwolf to kill believers of magic, executes the president. Avatar uses his power to change the robot's personality to good, and renames him Peace. He, Peace, Elinore and the elf warrior Weehawk set out to Blackwolf's fortress in Scortch to put an end to his evil ways.

Blackwolf's armies are slowly conquering the world through the use of his secret weapon, which turns out to be a film projector running newsreel footage of Nazi Germany. Just by showing this movie of Hitler raving and Panzers rolling, the good armies fall into a stupor and cannot fight.

Now, a lot of logistical problems with that. First of all, it's made explicit that millions of years have passed since nuclear weapons ravaged the planet. Even if any projectors survived the bombing, they would have turned to dust by now. And celluloid film would have disintegrated within a few hundred years, max.

Next, even if this stuff were somehow still around or Blackwolf managed to recreate them, how does he project the images into the sky above his enemies? Again, the movie specifically shows him using a small projector, not even 35 mm. There are no giant screens suspended in the sky. OK, let's say he's just using his magic.

But even if all these other objections didn't exist, why would the simple image of Nazis make soldiers swoon? They don't know who the hell Hitler is or what the Nazis did. They have no context to be horrified by these images. Seeing tanks shells tearing up a battlefield is certainly nothing that would bother hardened fighters used to hand-to-hand combat.

The film (also written by Bakshi) sets up the struggle as an epic one between nature and technology. In the end, of course, when Avatar finally faces Blackwolf in their final showdown, he pulls out a pistol and shoots him.

This is what I mean about cartoonish. Although it's a great laugh moment, it completely undermines everything that came before. Bakshi always seems to fall back on goofy humor and a drawing style inspired by Scooby-Doo. That's not to say that he didn't have a great imagination; his instincts were just more "Fritz the Cat" than "Lord of the Rings."

1.5 stars out of four

Video review: "The Lord of the Rings" and "LOTR Trilogy"

The Lords are finally going Blu.

The "Lord of the Rings" movies are being issued on Blu-ray today. And I do mean all of them: The trilogy of 2001-03 films directed by Peter Jackson, which is being released as a single set, and the animated version directed by Ralph Bakshi in 1978.

The fates of those disparate attempts to bring J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasyland of hobbits, orcs and elves to cinematic life could not have been more diverse. Jackson's films set box office records and won a slew of Oscars, while Bakshi's version remains a punch line for serious Tolkienites, who dismiss it as a cartoon for kiddies.

Say what you will about Bakshi's much-maligned take, it looks great on a big TV in Blu-ray. The film itself hasn't improved with age; the cutesy depiction of Frodo and the other hobbits as big-haired moppets still grates. And the technique of "rotoscoping" -- filming live action and turning it into animation -- makes for jerky action scenes.

It doesn't help that the story abruptly stops about two-thirds of the way through Tolkien's novel. Bakshi intended the epic tale to be divided into two parts, but the studio refused to fund a sequel.

Jackson had about 70 times more money to play with than Bakshi did, and it shows. The story was split into three parts, just as publishers generally did with Tolkien's book.

But beyond production values, Jackson and his crew hew closer to Tolkien's vision in both plot and tone. They understood that they were translating an entire world into film -- and fans wanted it treated seriously.

The only downside of the LOTR Trilogy's arrival on Blu-ray (which had been delayed repeatedly) is that this set includes only the theatrical version of the films. The longer -- and better -- extended versions are expected to make their hi-def debut eventually, but no date is set.

Extras for the Bakshi version are limited to a single item: A 30-minute documentary covering Bakshi's career. There's some interesting behind-the-scenes photographs and footage from the "Rings" production, and interviews with Bakshi, his children and collaborators. But it mentions nothing about his intention to do a sequel, or the film's dismal reception, or other critical subjects.

The features for the LOTR trilogy closely mirror those of the extended DVD version, although the multiple commentary tracks are missing. It's an exhilarating and exhausting collection of hours' worth of interviews, features and documentaries. The nine-disc set also includes digital copies of each film.

Personally, I'll wait for the Blu-ray extended version.

Movies: Bakshi version: 2 stars; Jackson version: 4 stars
Extras: Bakshi: 1.5 stars; Jackson: 3.5 stars