The best Non-Disney film that reaches the emotional levels of Pixar before Dreamworks' How To Train Your Dragon

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2012)

Generation after generation, Pixar and Dreamworks Animation has started to become very successful CGI animation companies creating such great hits like Toy Story (1995) a story about toys who come to life and face many villains and many dangers in lost of their adventures and Shrek (2001) about an ogre who is sent on a mission with his donkey friend to rescue a princess in an epic tale of pop culture references, but before they continue making more groundbreaking movies, Blue Sky Studios, a division of 20th Century Fox Animation, seems to be facing those two companies as they make their first debut in the CGI animation genre by making this their very first masterpiece from the past ten years, "Ice Age", a story about three Paleolithic animals named Manny, a mammoth, Diego, a saber-tooth tiger, and Sid, a sloth on an adventure to return a baby to the human tribe.
Considering that I watched this a few times on video when I was little child after it's release in theaters in 2002 and still loved it even as a young adult, this film is the best non-Disney film that reaches the emotional levels as Pixar before Dreamworks' How To Train Your Dragon which also became a masterpiece in 2010 after this one.
The story is very original with likable characters and includes touching and emotional scenes where Manny discovers that his kind were killed by the humans and I actually felt sorry for him seeing how we humans had done such a terrible thing in killing animals in terms of live-action and animation. It also has hilarious dialogue and laugh-out-loud comedy including where Diego and Sid try to cheer the baby up with Sid getting hit by Manny causing him to make a weird face which caused me to laugh my head off.
The strongest aspects of the film are the animation and the voice cast. The visuals are lovely with the impressive look of the mountains and the look of the ice glaciers while having great character animation with the animation on the animals as the best. The voice actors are great. Ray Romano did a good job as Manny, Denis Leary did great as Diego, but I think John Leguizamo as Sid and the evil saber-tooth tiger named Soto (which is, in my opinion, the best non-Disney villain in an animated film since Rasputin from Anastasia due to his dark nature and intent on killing the baby) voiced by Goran Visnjic steal the show.
The orchestra score from David Newman is also the strongest aspect of the film with a great opening sequence and a great song "Send Me On My Way" while having a mixture of drama, suspense, and emotion.
Since this film became so popular it spawned two sequels with a fourth one coming this year, but not only that. It became a start of Blue Sky Studios' career in making other CGI films including Robots, Horton Hears A Who, and Rio and although not as compelling as this film, they were both enjoyable and fun. Since I still loved it, Ice Age will remain one of the greatest masterpieces of computer animation since Toy Story.