Sub-zero heroes on an adult-humoured adventure

Rating: 8/10 (28 September 2006)

I've been having a bit of an animation treat lately with films such as Robots, Finding Nemo, Shrek II and Ice Age and while I may have had my favourite all along, this viewing cemented "Ice Age" as the best of the bunch. It holds up amazingly well since its primary focus is not meticulous animation (like DreamWorks focus on), but story and humour. Sure, you could probably find an animated film with more heartfelt messages and substance than this (Finding Nemo), but I dare you to find a funnier one. This film remains completely unrivaled in the laugh-department.
Its sequel, Ice Age: The Meltdown, rode largely on this humour advantage throughout and unsurprisingly suffered a few pitfalls when it attempted to 'get serious' by adding morals and messages. Thankfully, Ice Age does not have this problem because it knows it is mostly funny and it makes no pretense about it. Make no mistake however; it was originally written as a drama and therefore still has a lot of story to fall back on  the story of three outcasts turned Sub-Zero heroes (Manny the Mammoth, Sid the Sloth and Diego the sabre-toothed tiger) joining up to return a human baby to its herd  and all the detours, diversions and conflicts that this journey entails, pinning the stunningly hilarious prehistoric rodent-squirrel Scrat somewhere in between, collecting his acorns. No words can describe how funny this character is but the special short on him on the DVD extra material should give you some idea.
So if there is just this one template story and humour, without heartfelt messages á la Disney/Pixar and meticulous fluent animation á la DreamWorks, then how does it manage to be such a great film? I don't know, but it is likely that its success stems from the fact that it lacks these very aspects of its peers. For example, it does not indulge in homages and references to the same extent as DreamWorks (except one little Star Trek joke squeezed in) and it never falls prey to predictable sappiness in the same way that Disney does. Without these things it therefore NEEDS a great backstory and fun characters to fall back on  and it truly does.
It is a bit more adult-humoured, too. There is a continuous gay joke with the rhinos Carl and Frank, for example. It never resorts to fart or pee jokes (ok - fine, there is a poop-joke, but so what?). There is an hilarious joke about modern architecture  Manny walking past Stonehenge and remarking on how "it'll never last." There is subtle use of irony in all the animals being able to express themselves eloquently while no humans talk in the film. It's insightful. The children's side of things is best tended to by John Leguizamo as Sid, who has clearly done something very cool with his character which ends up catering just as much to adults as its target audience  which is probably true for the whole film.
8 out 10