The Horrific Implications Of Fire And Ice

I recently watched an animated movie that was overall bad and boring, but was also fascinating in its concept, visually gripping, and though it didn’t intend to be, deeply existentially horrifying.

This was an older film, from the early ‘80s, and I can’t say it’s relevant in the film landscape today. I chose to watch it in part to help me research a future post I’m working on about Jungian archetypes in animation (it’s a mouthful I know, I think it will make sense if I ever get around to tackling it), but I found this film to be in a category of its own, and weird enough to merit some discussion.

Fire and Ice is a film by Ralph Bakshi, infamous animator responsible for the outrageously hyper-sexual Fritz the Cat movies, a very trippy-looking Lord Of The Rings adaptation, and a handful of other animated cult classics.

Fire and Ice seems to be uniquely weird, even among Bakshi’s already uniquely weird filmography. While most of his other films have a really playful and comedic tone, Fire and Ice is one hundred percent stone-cold sober and serious.

It tells an extremely straightforward and simplistic fantasy narrative, to the point that it seems almost to be made for children; in fact it is actually classified as a kid’s movie (even now on mulitple Youtube kids’ channels where you can see the whole thing for free), though I can’t see how they get away with it.

The two main characters spend the entire movie almost, almost, naked. And although there’s no actual sexual content, the movie hints at it pretty bluntly. Now, I don’t ascribe to the idea that nudity and mild sexuality are necessarily bad for children to be exposed to, but the MPAA certainly does, so it kind of boggles my mind this thing is rated PG.

(I suppose this was the very early days of the MPAA rating system, I think if anything with this much nudity came out in the following decades it would certainly have gotten a higher rating).

But the part that’s way, way more confusing about this being labeled as a children’s movie is the frequent graphic violence, and the um, well the uh… genocidal undertones. Not that the movie intended those undertones, mind you, it’s just that if you look too deep behind the whimsical fantasy adventure setting, there’s a pretty freakin’ dark implication.

Allow me to explain.

The opening monologue tells us that the story takes place at the end of the last ice age, and this is one of the things I actually love about the movie. Almost all fantasy settings are based on medieval societies, sometimes futuristic societies, or occasionally classical or bronze age societies, but I don’t know if I’ve seen any other fantasy set in truly prehistoric times.

This is a time period several thousands years before any known civilization, a time when we know humans existed yet we know almost nothing about them, when monumental architecture and complex hierarchies may have existed somewhere, but they are as of yet invisible to us in modern times.

This actually makes it easier to suspend disbelief for me, because for all we know this could be what that time period was really like. It’s all theoretically plausible (aside from the wizards, I suppose).

Just as importantly, from an artistic standpoint the deep-history setting adds another layer of intrigue and ominousness. To imagine human dramas so deep in the unrecorded past, in complex societies operating on cavemen level technology, and among the ruins of an even more ancient and more advanced society that they never explain… it makes my skin crawl, and I love it.

But this ice age setting is also part of what makes the film problematic, because of how they portray a contemporary hominin species, which the film is not shy about referring to as “sub-humans”.

These characters are the totally disposable lackeys of the northern ice queen. And while she and her wizard son look just like all the other humans in the story, the “sub-humans” are clearly modeled on neanderthals.

Again, this context is part of what makes it so fascinating, because modern research has shown that our human ancestors coexisted with neanderthals and with other hominin sub-species. We know they interacted in some way, shape, or form but it’s pretty much all guesswork as to what that actually looked like, how any of it really played out.

(Here is a great little video essay on that subject).

It’s fascinating to see a film try to imagine that relationship, but an important thing that we know now, which wasn’t known back then, is that there was some interbreeding at some point between humans and neanderthals, and that some modern humans still have fragments of neanderthal DNA.

So when Fire and Ice portrays neanderthals as mindless brutes who are treated as completely expendable by the human characters, and whose violent deaths the film frames as perfectly justified, it really takes on a darker meaning in the current scientific context.

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD (not that you should care, don’t watch this movie for the story)

Since the “sub-humans” are servants of the ice queen, when she ultimately loses the battle against the fire kingdom and the ice queendom is destroyed, it shows many of the “sub-humans” being destroyed along with it, and indicates that their habitat and way of life have been destroyed as well. The film’s intended happy ending more or less implies a genocide of the “sub-humans”.

This film is rated PG

I really don’t think the filmmakers intended any statement about genetic superiority or neanderthals’ relationship to modern humans in any form, and even if they did it wouldn’t be clear what. In fact they did include a short scene where (as kind of an afterthought, it feels like) Teegra convinces Larn not to murder the last “sub-human”, who is injured and defenseless. It’s kind of a bare minimum morality, but at least they did it.

I think the reason they barely thought about that morality though, is because at the time this film was made, the scientific consensus was that neanderthals had died off well before modern humans occupied the same territory. My guess is that the filmmakers thought of it as another of the fantastical elements of the story, mixing humans with more ancient and unknown species, as if they were dinosaurs basically.

But this is what makes it disturbing from a modern perspective, with our more advanced scientific understanding. It’s well established now that most people have traces of other hominins in their DNA. To think of describing that as “sub-human” DNA would not just be politically incorrect, it would essentially be eugenics.

Just to nip that whole train of thought in the bud: my scientific understanding is that the overall genetic picture of humanity is an absolute clusterfuck, literally, and it would be extremely dubious to claim that any particular ethnicity of people in the world today is part neanderthal, or part homo erectus, or whatever. In the tens of thousands of years since those genes intermingled with homo sapiens, they’ve been watered down over many hundreds of generations, and could not possibly indicate any mental-emotional-social differences from humans who don’t have those genes.

Unfortunately, we all know there are people out there who like to make those claims, and worse, to make value judgements based on those claims, which is where the real social danger lies. From a 2022 perspective, this movie makes the culture-war part of my brain want to explode.

But even with the modern critical lens notwithstanding, it still perturbs my inner anthropologist to see these close relatives to modern humans portrayed as “sub-human”, as if their suffering is of no consequence.

Even if we had no genetic connection to neanderthals, they were similar enough to us that they had most or nearly all of the same emotional and social characteristics we tend to define as uniquely human.

They used complex tools, practiced ritual burial, created artwork, and lived in tight-knit family groups, the same as their homo sapien cousins. I know the ‘80s were a different time, but I feel like even then they should have been a little more aware of the hideous implication here.

And it sure doesn’t help things that they made the lead human characters pale white skinned, while the so-called “sub-humans” are much darker—if we want to get technical about it, neanderthals almost certainly would have been lighter skinned than the homo sapiens who eventually moved into their territory (Red-Haired Neanderthals).

Again, I don’t think the filmmakers intended a racial commentary at all, but then again I don’t think they even considered their choices from that perspective. In any case, it’s just a bit silly to paint a native jungle-dweller as pale white, blonde haired, and blue-eyed. Like, where’s his sunburn?

At least the other human characters appear to be of various ethnicities, interacting on equal footing. But man, the ‘80s had such a major hard-on for that Conan archetype.

Oooookaay there’s no way this movie warrants so much discussion, but as final thoughts I will say I really enjoyed some of the animation. The weird way they made this movie gives it a unique look and a compelling vibe. The lead humans get a lot of nearly-nude screen-time, and at least they are nice to look at. Plus a lot of the environments they explore are fun and interesting.

Unfortunately most of the backgrounds were really flat and devoid of detail. And despite the cool effect it has in some scenes, the rotoscoping process (this is rotoscoping) also causes a sort of lagginess in the characters’ movements, which gets pretty obnoxious during the action scenes.

Finally, as a narrative this movie straight-up failed, and in some obvious places. There are quick side-plots that get resolved in seconds, meanwhile there’s seemingly endless time spent just running around in the forest. It’s unfortunate because they easily could have shuffled some story beats around and expanded a few characters and given it some sense of pacing. Then again, maybe it’s better they didn’t make something more entertaining, considering it’s horrifying meta-text.

Okay I gotta stop with this thing. As much as I was bored watching it, writing this sort of makes me want to watch it again. Maybe I’m the one who can’t get enough of that Conan archetype…

But what do you think? Have you seen this weird ass movie? Can you believe it’s supposed to be for kids? Let me know in the comments, thanks for reading!