1983 - FIRE AND ICE, an animated fantasy epic.

Probably looking for a commercial hit after the success of Arnold's Conan the Barbarian. The director Ralph Bakshi along with the comic book artist Frank Frazetta dreamed up this story of muscle bound heroes, nearly naked buxom babes, evil magicians, scary monsters and did I mention nearly naked buxom babes.

To save money on animation Bakshi and his crew rotoscoped the main characters. This is a technique which involves tracing over live actors to make them look like comic book people.  The now animated characters are then placed in exotic backgrounds  The result is interesting if a little jarring at times when viewed.  Bakshi had used this technique on several R rated cartoons notably Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic.  He had uneven success in Hollywood as R rated animated cartoons didn't exactly make for a family night at the moves.

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Fire and Ice is loaded with lots of fighting and entertains as an action film although the story is really nothing special.  The good vs evil fantasy stuff had been done before and in better films.  Fire and Ice is at best an okay time killer.  The weird looking animation does give it an interesting look.

The film was written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, a couple of comic book writers.  The running time is 81 minutes.

1978 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the animated version

Before the Peter Jackson's epic there was this oddball animated film version of the Tolkien book.

This The Lord of the Rings is essentially the same as  the other Lord of the Rings with the main virtue of this film being that it gets through 1.5 of the books in roughly 2 hours, something that Peter Jackson probably couldn't have begun to contemplate doing.

Ralph Bakshi, the director struggles with the usual Tolkien adaptation issues, the unwieldy number of characters, some with 2 or 3 different names and the desire to stay faithful to Tolkien's very long story.  Bakshi's other problem is with his mix of the cartoon characters representing the Hobbits and Golem and the live action characters who are rotoscoped.  It all blends together very uncomfortably,

Frankly the film is also kind of ugly looking.

132 minutes, written by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle.