"Fire and Ice," legendary fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta's only film credit, is getting the "Sin City" treatment thanks to Sony Pictures, according to a report by Deadline.
Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, a longtime pal of the artist, has been quietly pushing for the deal for some time. Deadline reports Sony has acquired the rights. The intention is to, Deadline reports, turn the movie, created by Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi, into a fantasy adventure franchise, "informed by the dreamlike worlds Frazetta poured into his paintings."
If the pairing of Frazetta and Rodriguez wasn't enough to get you excited, the auteur stated that his plan is to create a movie that, as with "Sin City," will be a film created to honor the artist's vision.
"Sin City reflected Miller's two-dimensional plane and had an abstract very graphic quality to it, while Frazetta's is this heightened reality, or rather layers of unreality that create a dream like reality you can get lost in, with an adventure film right out of his imagination," Rodriguez told Deadline. "If we get the script in the next couple months, by the end of spring or start of summer, we start preproduction."
In 1983's animated "Fire and Ice," Frazetta partnered with renowned animation director Bakshi, whose other works include "Fritz the Cat," "The Lord of the Rings" and "Wizards." They used Bakshi's rotoscoping process (first shooting in live-action and then tracing to film cels), which he pioneered on 1978s "Lord of the Rings" film, to give the animated characters more life. The screenplay was written by former Marvel "Conan" scribes Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, with the background landscapes created by Thomas Kinkade and Dinotopia's James Gurney.
The plot of the film is pure comic book fantasy, and it tells the tale of encroaching glaciers manipulated by an evil Queen trying to but the entire planet in a deep freeze. When the daughter of the King of Firekeep is abducted, heroes Larn and Darkwolf set out to bring her home.
