Not as good as it might seem...

Rating: Null/10 (8 April 2002)

This film raises quite a few points about what qualifies as good animation these days. Many people seem to be of the opinion that computer generated animation is automatically 'better' than the hand drawn variety but I fail to see it. How superficial has our society become when we claim to be satisfactorily entertained by a flimsy story rendered in a largely sterile style of animation? Lost to us is the artistry and skill with which past greats like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was brought to us. There are many reasons why this is not a particularly good film, yet all require one to think, so most people will fail to realise this and give it a good review; fair enough. If you only want an entertaining pastime for 80 minutes or so, something to occupy the kids on a Sunday afternoon, then Ice Age will do the job better than many; at least it *is* suitable for kids (all too rare these days, even when intended for them) with little scatological humour and no jokes of a sexual nature. Look more critically at Ice Age though and several things are apparent. The story, as I have said, is wafer thin, making the film rely too heavily on the character animation for its entertainment value. These are fine but I couldn't help but feel that *all* the effort had gone into them; apart from the three main characters, all the others looked very plain and in many cases e.g. the fat sabre-toothed tiger and the small, particularly nasty, sabre-toothed tiger, actually seemed to have been designed by different hands. This is a bad thing in any type of film, when the viewer senses that not everyone who was on board the project was pulling in the same direction. The style of these animations wasn't in harmony with the leads. Furthermore, none of them had any real depth; an attempt was made at this with Manfred, but it was way too little to generate the kind of sympathy audiences built up for characters in the great Disney features. This means that Ice Age relies throughout, entirely, on the nuances of animation in what the characters do as opposed to what motivates them. Luckily, what the characters do *is* entertaining - they are funny, look great, and say funny things with good sounding voices. There are some great set pieces e.g. the ice slide sequence, and the genuinely dramatic lava flow, with some great sound effects. I was unhappy with the super-realistic water; judging from everything else in the film, the intent wasn't to make the film 'realistic' yet the water looked incredibly so. This worked to draw the attention to how real the water looked and away from the film; yet it clearly couldn't have been rendered in any other way than by computer, so surely this undermines any real artistic talent that may have been on display elsewhere. I wish more effort had been put into story and characterisation than in developing water-rendering computer software. As well as those characters that looked odd, the entire dodo sequence didn't seem to fit in with the film's look.
Overall, Ice Age is a slick-appearing film with too much emphasis on the superficial, which, given the success of the overated Pixar films, is exactly what most people want.