Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme two, part three - a swords and sorcery film!
(Chosen by John!)
After making our way through an exaggerated, dirty, satirical take on medieval Britain with fantasy elements squashed in round the margins to highlight how pathetic everything looks, and a Japanese legend retrofitted to play with martial arts and tokatsu sentai conventions, we come to the real deal swords and sorcery film. A primitive realm where enormous spiked iguanas roam the misty jungle swamps, great barbarian heroes cleave through wicked minions with ease, kingdoms of base elemental nature clash in gouts of raging lava and freezing glaciers, and nobody wears anything more than a loin-thong and maybe a few additional fabric scraps. From a collaboration between Ralph Bakshi in the wake of his one-two adult animated feature punch of Wizards and Lord of the Rings, and illustrator Frank Frazetta after two decades of redefining the public perception of Conan, John Carter, and Tarzan with his painted illustrations for their rerelease covers, we are gifted Fire and Ice. Boasting as simple a premise as one could ask - minions of the dread ice wizard Nekron chase Princess Teegra of Firekeep through the equator's underbrush, while wandering warriors Larn and Darkwolf follow in hot pursuit and hopes of penetrating the wizard's glacial keep - this movie gives itself over to extended sequences of characters wandering the world, coming across strange creatures and characters, and letting their simple but forceful personalities explode at appropriate moments, well before it ever considers doing something different. Much as the aesthetics of Jabberwocky and Takeru Yamato were enjoyable distractions from their iffy stories and structures, it's so nice to sink oneself into an unapologetic evocation of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Mark you, unmitigated replications of those turn-of-the-century fantasy stories isn't a universal good. A LOT of Fire and Ice's fantasy action revolves around Nekron's minions as they alternate between dragging Princess Teegra through the jungle, following her escaped tracks, and engaging in battle with the heroes. They are, to put it bluntly, near-carbon copies of every racist depiction of the savage horde from those works. Their skin tone is substantially darker and duskier than almost anyone in the film, their faces somewhere between Neanderthalic and outright apish, their movements shambling and uncoordinated, their speech either obscured behind an untranslated foreign tongue written to sound brutish or simple grunts with no real meaning behind it I can't tell since it changes from scene to scene, and when we finally get a name for what their group is, it's "subhumans." Some praises I'm going to offer the film are blunted somewhat knowing they involve how characters interact with these minions, as they are so clearly unintelligent and incapable in the mold of so many impossible-to-civilize, inherently-inhuman beastmen. It's made a little better by their close-ups all looking distinct from one another, their deaths being played for some minor pathos when not delivered by heroic hands, and a moment of mercy at the very end, but there's so much overt coding going on otherwise as to make these humanizing aspects feel not nearly sufficient. The film occasionally approaches toying with how they are wrongfully enslaved by a powerful master, and should've leaned into this further, failing the option of "don't call your slavering, dark-skinned monster people subhumans."
Switching gears to more positive aspects while still talking blatant negative coding, the film's other major villainous presence in Nekron actually works very well for me. Nekron, to my eyes, only reads as gay: the very first proper animated thing we see after a sketched introduction is Nekron writing about on his throne, his face in twisted ecstasy as he exercises his considerable powers to make his glacier advance on a helpless village, massive phallic pillars erupting skywards before the tips shatter and bury the soldiers in hunks of semi-solid white. This marks him as a very sexual character, but given how spiteful he is towards his mother for daring to bring him a near-naked wench for breeding purposes before taking special interest in the equally naked barbarian hero to the point of shedding his robes and sparring the man in naught but a thong himself, it's difficult to shake the impression. I can see how this is MEANT to read as the evil wizard possessing gay characteristics to repulse the audience and make hating him easier, and so can see the point where I'm supposed to condemn Bakshi for such a homophobic character concept. With Nekron, though, I just can't go there. The coding is too far above subtext, too obvious and easy to scan as "This man's character traits are the following: ice wizard, no pants, gay as hell" to register as hateful or damaging. Nekron is a dweeby little twenty-something who knows exactly what he likes, hangs around his mom's house masturbating day in and day out, throws a fit whenever she tries to marry him off, and gets off to how much better he is than everyone. I'm half-tempted to say he's a perfect subject for reclamation, an animated gay icon if there ever was. Where the "subhumans" are too entrenched in attitudes from centuries past for their sympathetic elements to work, Nekron is too perfectly pissy and smug and endearing in a very modern way for his all-too blatant gay coding to harm his presence.
And hey, wouldn't you know it, there are parts of Fire and Ice that DON'T revolve around sociopolitical topics! I'm very much a fan of how Teegra is written as a far more dynamic character than most kidnapped princess in the subgenre. Not really a deep character, because let's face it, nobody in this movie has personality beyond what you get on sight; rather, one who's always responsible for her own escape, and gets to kill substantially more than even the rare single pity kill such characters are typically afforded. True, she's drawn, animated, framed, and generally treated like a sex object way more than any other near-naked character in the film, female or otherwise, but it doesn't come at the expense of her getting to be competent or badass in her own way, even if the creatures she outwits are presented as half-wits. Granted, everyone in the film seems like a wimp compared to badass supreme Darkwolf, who is my favorite character. Making the hulking, hypercompetent warrior guy who'd otherwise serve as the protagonist in this tale a mysterious figure who watches from the shadows and only intersects with the protagonists to rescue them from a bad situation or effortlessly cut his way through an entire army helps his appearances play so much larger than life. He looks and acts like a prehistoric mix between Batman and Black Panther, he gets to turn the background a solid color with the sheer power of his enraged bellow twice, he does cool things like save the main character's life by hurling him off a cliff, and he's the one who engages in the final duel with second-best character Nekron. I love him to pieces, and think he shows up in the film exactly as much as he should.
He also takes the pose of the Death Dealer a few times throughout, which brings us to another major strength of Fire and Ice - Frank Frazetta's designs and backgrounds. It's impressive how many of these paintings we only glimpse for a few brief seconds. They're decidedly sketchier than his full-sized cover work and standalone pieces, as they need to match both budget and character aesthetics, which demand a simpler style than his usual bent. Through this, he still does a great job of evoking steamy jungles, festering swamps, crumbling ruins, and frigid ice fortresses, often from multiple angles for the same scene. A great enough job that the aesthetic pleasure of looking at his backgrounds almost distracts one from how exposed everyone is, and how they should definitely look significantly more marked by their environments if they're so close to total nakedness. It's a weird decision, one you can easily parse as making sense in a line of text yet feels weird on rotoscope-animated characters, but it makes the film more distinct and gives it a solid ancient vibe more often than not. In a rare case for me, I kinda wish the film were a bit bloodier and gorier, with all these grievous blade and axe wounds on unprotected skin - it seems there's supposed to be a greater degree of brutality to this murky, sketchy world, and the most one gets whenever steel meets flesh is a small, brief spray of black dots. Doesn't quite jive with how well everything else ties together.
Fire and Ice is no grand triumph of animation or fantasy storytelling - it's too content to play things out according to the beats and conventions of narratives seventy years its senior to rise so high. It is, however, an incredibly solid, enjoyable piece of animated pulp entertainment, indulgent in its chases and skirmishes throughout a fantasy world populated by... OK, two really great characters, and a bunch of mixed weirdos and sturdy stock figures. I do wish it had a little more, considering how the ending takes a suddenly apocalyptic turn and implies some grander purpose behind the whole adventure than anything else in the movie. Such a gripe can't prevent me from having liked the ride for all its backwards thinking flaws. A standard swords and sorcery romp without any frills has its own charm, and this one has Nekron and Darkwolf being respectively flamboyant and awesome on top of everything, so I'll come away from here serviced any day.
Seriously, though, don't fucking call your minions "subhumans." It'd be bad enough if just Nekron did it, cause they show he's bigoted towards anyone and everyone, but other characters take up the name too, and it's uncomfortable 'n' weird.
3.5/5
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