ICE is an old school anime movie with the claim to fame is that it is Makoto Kobayashi, creator of the Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ series, who did some design work for this movie. The movie is basically a 3-episode series that has been put together in movie format. Most sites list this title with a release date of 2008 in Japan, but the actual production/release date has to be somewhere in the mid-90's or earlier. If not, the movie is very oddly trying to imitate the period. There are several reasons for this, mainly that the show predicts the dramatic, apocalyptic end of the world to happen in 2010 as a result of environmental decline and bio-weapons. You typically don't make movies about things that aren't remotely close to happening in the 2 years following its release, as it instantly breaks any suspension of disbelief. The style is also a little old, placing it into this time period with its sharp facial features, watery eyes, and slightly poofy hair. The movie is also in 4:3 format, typical of series that started on TV in that time. Anything in the last decade would likely have been in wide-screen, 16:9 format. Lastly, the cellphones are a give-away. In this movie, the designers were still imagining text-only phones with large buttons, that still looked like typical wireless household land-line phones. That being said, it looks like the movie was given a bit of CG help here and there, and looks very much cleaned up.

On a side note (and another oddity about this DVD), the DVD menus have not been translated. Figuring out the subtitle option is easy enough, but if you can't read katakana, then you might have a hard time selecting between the two Dolby Digital options. Oh, and chapter selection doesn't have handy thumbnail pictures, so if you can't read the titles there, you'll have some trouble skipping around to the section you want. Oh yeah, and the special feature with interviews of the show's creators is also completely untranslated (though it oddly features interviews with a lot of Westerner movie-goers speaking Japanese and English).

As for the plot of this movie, oh, please help me. This is another clue as to the age of this movie. I was a fan of anime in the early days when you had to sift through a lot of this kind of stuff because there weren't a lot of resources to check out anime before you bought it, and there simply wasn't a lot of anime available in the West. This movie is a mess of different concepts, which on their own sound interesting, but together never get developed fully and are simply confusing. You've basically got the end of the world here. Bio-weapons seem to have eliminated all males of the human race. You've got two factions of women that are opposing each other. It seems one faction, led by a queen-like ruler named Kisalagi, wants to wait until the world ends, and live in decadence until the human race inevitably dies. The other faction, led by Guilia, is more militarized and is investigating means to create baby boys.

A number of very confusing things happen around these concepts. The two factions are fighting. There are still terrorists. It's only 2010, but there are spacecraft-like vehicles and super futuristic mechs and weapons. One squad is investigating a house and sees a baby boy, and they freak out and kill it. They kill a baby boy in a world with no males to perpetuate the human race. The human baby boy is also never explained. W. T. F. people. There's eyeball licking (also not explained, but thanks for not spending more time on it), a woman is half jellyfish (little to no reason for this as well), and I swear every time a character asks a question like "What is I.C.E.?" I scream "YES WHAT THE HELL IS IT ALREADY?"

I do give the movie credit for avoiding some concepts I thought would really be exploited. There's no shot of giggling girls in a locker room. Women aren't constantly lusting after one another or using sex as a weapon. It's not scene after scene of women naked just because they can be. There's a few scenes where it's clear someone had sex and there is some nudity, and there are some relationships of course, but it's not too explicit. That being said, this is not a kids show by any means. And that being said, man is this movie boring and plodding.

This movie has a message. If you don't get that message the first time, it repeats it, blatantly, openly, in print and through the character's voices. It's quite annoying, especially after the first time, but especially when it doesn't give the audience credit. I suppose it's better than many anime productions that don't seem to have a point or an ending, but still aggravating. Oh and that message is: be nice, don't keep fighting wars, preserve the environment. Otherwise we'll end up in a world with no males and constant war, and we're not going to be able to eat fish and stuff.

In the end, ICE is typical of older anime productions of the mid-90s (even though it's supposed to be from only about 4 years ago). You feel like you're not "in" on the plot, you feel like you're being left out of important details, and you stick along because you believe there will be a payoff where it will all get explained and it will be AWESOME. Nope. This is a world full of women, that are fighting each other, collectively ignoring the fact that they're the last of the species, and there are some bio-weapons, period. End of story. The psychological state of the last group of humans on Earth, all female, the possibilities for some heavy, interesting plots: it's all just stepped over to create another generic, boring anime. On the other hand, if you want to feel like you're time tripping and that the rest of the world is trying to pull a conspiracy on you and make you believe the smartphones were only released in the last 3 years, by all means break out the Pocky and Ramune and pop this DVD in.