Fire And Ice

Released in the summer of 1983, FIRE AND ICE offered the audience a unique visual experience. In his earlier features, Bakshi's animation style had been marked by reliance on a technique called rotoscoping, in which his artists would take live action footage and trace over it, frame by frame, to create drawn images which were then animated. Presaging today's use of motion capture in CGI-animation, Bakshi and Frazetta first spent 4-6 weeks filming live actors performing with simple props on a bare sound stage. That footage was rotoscoped and then animated one frame at a time in the manner of traditional cel animation. The experience of watching FIRE AND ICE is greatly enhanced by it's musical score, which was Bakshi's first collaboration with William Kraft, a composer originally from the classical world. William Kraft's music for FIRE AND ICE is a thunderous, large scale composition, developed and orchestrated not in a Hollywood fashion but in the manner of old school classicism. His previous film scores had been necessarily atmospheric and progressive but with FIRE AND ICE, the composer enjoyed the opportunity to be highly thematic. All of the main characters have their own themes, which interact constantly throughout the score. The music for FIRE AND ICE was orchestrated by Angela Morley, a noted film composer in her own right (WATERSHIP DOWN) who also orchestrated for John Williams throughout the 1990s. FIRE AND ICE was recorded at Paramount Studios with a large size orchestra, with Dan Wallin serving as music scoring mixer, which gave Kraft's score a generously large sonic dimension. Evoking the sorceries of ages past and the unsung heroes of fable and fantasy, the score for FIRE AND ICE is a battle between beneficent heroism and dark sorcery, sculpting the film's brutal landscape with heavy swaths of low horns, ascending trumpets, and plenty of percussion.