Decades ago Frank Frazetta, Ralph Bakshi, Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas got together and made a movie that blew me away as a nine year old. That film was Fire and Ice, a fantasy adventure featuring buxom women and musclebound swordsmen and monsters and wizards and all the shit that you tried to include in your better homemade D&D modules. Fire and Ice, like Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, was made using rotoscoping, giving the animation a fluid, realistic look.
Robert Rodriguez has been hunting down the rights to remake that film for years, and now he tells Aint It Cool that he’s finally got them. Says Rodriguez, ‘The awesome Ralph Bakshi and I have been working it out for a while, and it’s now a TROUBLEMAKER STUDIOS PICTURE. What’s cool is, unlike past projects that I’d get involved with that would get stalled for various reasons, I control the rights to this one. So it’s actually in my power to set it up and get it made, which wasn’t the case on other projects. And for you filmmakers out there, that’s really the best way to get things done. If you can manage to get the rights yourself to a property by dealing directly with the artists and creators like I did with Frank Miller on SIN CITY, and now with Ralph Bakshi on FIRE and ICE, it makes a world of difference and you can get started sooner rather than never.’
I imagine this is going to be another heavily green screened film, in the mode of Sin City, but with a completely different look and palette. I feel like a live action green screen version of a rotoscoped cartoon is… well, sort of redundant, honestly, but it’ll be interesting to see how this comes out.
For more about Rodriguez’s love for Frazetta, and to see him backpedal like mad on the Machete Arizona trailer, click here.
If you haven’t seen Fire and Ice, you really should. I haven’t seen the film in years – the DVD sits unopened in my house for some reason – so I don’t know if it’s as good as it was when I was a kid, but the imagery is utterly iconic when it comes to fantasy. You can buy the movie from CHUD by clicking here.
Watch the trailer: