Archer Winsten, NEW YORK POST
"Fantastic Monsters, Nightmarish Visions And Gobs Of Action!"

Amazon.com
The mighty-muscled heroes and big-bottomed babes of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta inspired animator Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, Wizards) to create the swords-and-sorcery epic Fire and Ice. Bakshi uses a technique called rotoscoping, which uses live-action film of actors as the template for animation, allowing him to put realistic action into fantastic environments. The verisimilitude of movement in a cartoon can be startling, but that's about all Fire and Ice has to offer; the wafer-thin story, overwrought characters, and clumsy dialogue are vapid cliches. Of much greater interest are the extras in this two-disc set, including a making-of feature that demonstrates the painstaking process of rotoscoping; enthusiastic commentary from Bakshi, who's a jovial, down-to-earth guy with a thick Brooklyn accent; deliriously fatuous diary notes from one of the actors; and a feature-length documentary called Frazetta: Painting with Fire, which reveals the artist to be more intriguing than any of the barbarians he's famous for. The effusive praise of other fantasy artists and "Frazetta historians" occasionally veers into Spinal Tap territory, but it's fascinating watching Frazetta turn from a 1950s James-Dean-style tough guy into the king of fantasy art. Though his work is often dismissed as adolescent kitsch, the documentary persuasively argues that Frazetta deservedly dominates his corner of the art world. --Bret Fetzer