Fire and Ice is a film that premiered five years before I was even born. I had no idea it existed until fairly recently, when it came up while I was watching something online. Curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to give it a watch. I wish I could say it was one of those great, overlooked films, but there’s a good reason it’s been relatively forgotten.

Ralph Bakshi is the creator and director of the movie, and it shares a lot of similarities with his other works. Like most of his films, it uses rotoscoping, a technique that involves shooting live action footage and then tracing the animation over it. It’s kind of cool in its own way, but the animation looks much more dated now.

The movie features an evil queen who gave birth to an arrogant prince named Nekron. Apparently, he has the power to control glaciers or something along those lines, and he uses this dark magic to overtake other territories, turning them into barren wastelands of frost and destruction.

The politics of the movie are fairly simplistic. Nekron and the Ice Peak people are portrayed as evil, while the Fire Keep kingdom is portrayed as good. Things change drastically when the Fire Keep kingdom’s beloved first daughter, Princess Teegra, is kidnapped. She is clearly meant to be used as a tool to control both kingdoms, as a potential consort to Nekron.

The main hero is technically Larn, who reminds me a lot of He-Man. The character of He-Man’s alter ego, Prince Adam, actually predates Larn by about two years with his comic book origin. The problem with Larn is that he is not especially powerful, and he is fairly simplistic in both his personality and his goals.

Princess Teegra is definitely the reason this film is remembered more than it probably should be. You would expect a royal princess to dress more modestly, but she is instead dressed in a tiny bikini with no back coverage, as if she is on South Beach in Miami, Florida. She wears it for the entire length of the movie, even in the sub-zero Ice Peak region. Ralph Bakshi was also behind Holly Would in Cool World, and suddenly it all starts to make a lot more sense.

Then there is the character of Darkwolf, who is kind of cool in theory, but the film does not give him enough time to properly flesh out his story. As a result, he ends up feeling more like a mediocre “cool side hero” than he probably should have been.

Fire and Ice reminds me a lot of Cool World. The latter, being the younger of the two films, is better animated, and both rely heavily on cartoon female eye candy. Unfortunately, both also suffer from pacing issues and overly simplistic storytelling. They could have been much better movies if they had been given a complete redo. I really wanted to like this one, but it has aged pretty badly. It’s no surprise that a planned remake from about ten years ago never materialized into an actual movie or TV show.