Thursday, July 2, 2009

An Army of Artists

Actors, painters and Xeroxmen work to create Ralph Bakshi's classic - "Fire and Ice", featuring the original artwork of fantasy legend Frank Frazetta. Much of the work looks mind-numbingly tedious, the labor intensive process of pre-computer rotoscope animation.

The film still looks great after all these years, always providing some trippy jungle ruins or impossible alien landscapes to focus on when the storyline gets thin.

The DVD I got from Netflix included some funny extras, including a retrospective with the fellow who played Larn, the hero of the story. He reads excerpts from his diary at the time of the shoot, when he was young and ambitious.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic work, digging that one up. I really enjoyed it! I went to see THE LORD OF THE RINGS at Lennox Square Mall a couple of months after I turned 13, and I remember being disappointed. But even then I found Bakshi's animation, steeped in rotoscoping, compelling.

X-2117 said...

I think I saw it at one of the Atlanta Fantasy Fairs, along with Bakshi's Wizards. Both of them blew me away at the time, steeped as I was in Conan novels and my father's science fiction.