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I've never been a Ralph Bakshi fan. His overuse of rotoscoping is distracting and makes for some really lazy and lame attempts at animation.
This being said, I actually really liked this film. Its a huge step above Wizards and The lord of the rings and if he had taken the same amount of time on his other films as he did with this one I would have been a big fan of his. I know he used rotoscoping in this film, but it is a huge step above his past efforts. The movie is fully animated and doesn't use grainy polarized film footage of real actors to fill in spots that he was to lazy to animate, like in past movies. For the most part the animation is smooth, especially human characters, but it does get rather jerky and basic with some of background and animal animations. The story is a basic save the princess kill the evil sorcerer plot, but it work very well because its kept simple and has great action that moves the movie along with out it slowing down to much.

I liked it. It was just good old fashioned sword and sorcery fun.  I wouldn't have minded if he had pumped out a few more like it.

I love this film, seen it many many times. At a comic convention in 1986 I got to see it in a theater setting with Bakshi there so that was cool. The rotoscoping here is more like that in Heavy Metal and it is not rushed or distracting, in fact one of the scenes the abduction of Tigra is done in slo-mo and is particularly effective. This film exhibited I think the full potential of that much maligned technique, and one that I might add would be resurrected in later films such as Waking Life using computers instead of physical animation and hailed as "innovative" :lookingup:

While many detractors have commented on the rather basic plot it was written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas who wrote most of the '70s Conan the Barbarian, and Savage Sword of Conan comics for Marvel so it had a long pedigree in fantasy. It is certainly a more adult oriented fantasy film, but one that is not gratuitous considering who the director was. One thing hinted at but never elaborated on is that Darkwolf is Necron's father, the scene where this is revealed hit the cutting room floor.

The pairing of Bakshi and Frazetta was something special, and even James Gurney (Dinotopia), and Thomas Kinkade (the Painter of Light) were background painters on this. I talked to James Gurney once and he told me that when Frazetta would visit the studio all he wanted to talk about with the animators was hot dogs and baseball  :teddyr:

Robert Rodriguez is a huge fan apparently and is set to make a live action version which Frazetta himself wanted to do. 

I may have to check it out. I like Sword and Sorcery, and I like animation, but Lord of the Rings and (vomit) American Pop made me write off Mr. Bakshi. I'll take it under advisement that Fire and Ice is more than just one cut above the aforementioned films.

I saw this in the theater, and like everyone so far, I liked it. My only regret was that Bakshi and Frazetta were never able to team up to make another film together.

I like this film and found the rotoscoping to be incredible well done and that it added to the movie.  Really gave life to some of the characters.  Collaberations like this can really show what happens when creative minds work together in sync.

I really hope the proposed live action never comes to pass.  It would lose so much of what makes the movie enjoyable.

It's definitely several steps above Bakshi's other films.  The rotoscoping itself is better done, but more importantly, the live action footage is of higher quality.  It's well-paced and has quite good action scenes.  Definitely worth a watch.