It's average...and immoral

Rating: 5/10 (18 January 2007)

Maybe a bit below. For me, "Ice Age" is what defined the decline of inventive story-telling in the new cgi era. I remember seeing this in theaters. I was thrilled to see it because I was mentally inclined to think that cgi = greatness thanks to the likes of Pixar. Aside from the incorporation of several "Scrat" sequences, the film was average average average. I had the thought process of the film fully envisioned in my head after viewing it. The creators needed a unique environment with some animals and chose the ice age. They then invented a very 'Shrek'-esque formula: a tetchy large protagonist is accompanied by a underdog who for no apparent reason insists on joining in on the journey to complete the task that is the conflict of the film. It is however less inspired than "Shrek" and the laughs are more sporadic. Well, for me anyway. I must admit that the audience is always driven to giggles over the annoying 'sabre tooth' squirrel thing that suffers in his many pursuits for nuts. I hate it, it's a Looney Tunes rehash. But if the crowd likes, fine. That is actually a merit for the film. The other characters, "Manny", "Sid" and "Diego" are average characters when it comes to personality. Diego is the soon-to-be-redeemed for his evil meat eating ways (as long as he's not human) character who will learn to befriend the annoying sloth and the stubborn Mammoth. Manny will learn to love and respect the small child that falls into his care despite the fact that the child will grow to cause the extinction of Manny's species. Too bad he can't learn to respect the tigers for attempting, like the humans, to live. Nope, the tigers are evil demons. Moving on.
Sid is the irritating sidekick. Dorry, Donkey, Mike from "Monster's Inc" all come to mind, although most likely it wasn't plagiarized from any of those. He did garner the most laughs aside from "Scrat", the infamous squirrel and his nut. The story overall is not very interesting or creative. Some animals find a human child and must return it, finding laughter along the way. The attention is gained from the character's antics (which many have grown to love). If you aren't interested in the characters you'd hate the movie. The overall theme of the film is that meat-eaters should give up meat and magically live while befriending the prey. Also, that animals are reprehensible for causing any kind of discrepancies to the human race in an effort to not be killed for their fur, and that the animals should deal with it. Indeed, a watermelon is "hilariously" stolen from some dodo birds for the human and we laugh at the stupid soon-to-be-extinct birds as our heroes effectively steal from them. The film epitomizes the formulaic talking animal genre, for the most part, but the main problem is that it relies on the gimmicks on the comedy and it isn't gut-wrenchingly funny. I had a hard time laughing at the screwed morality. Luckily, as usual, I was the only one who noticed it. What I have left to review is the animation, which for the time was adequate. The film is average, and it needs to get it's problems with the food chain settled out. It caused Ebert to give thumbs up to Disney's "The Wild" for paying heed to this issue.