Fun With Fossils

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2014)

If you want a showcase presentation for your big-screen Blu-Ray TV, "Ice Age" is a good way to go. It's brilliantly animated, with amazing texture and detail. As a story, it's more than a bit sloppy, and the humor is hit-and-miss, but it does get better as it goes and makes for painless companion viewing with the little 'uns.
Long before the dawn of modern man, we join a migration of prehistoric mammals – heading north instead of south. For Manfred (Ray Romano), a mammoth, and Sid (John Leguizamo), a giant sloth, it's less a marriage of convenience than the fact they have no one else. They meet an abandoned Neanderthal baby and a saber-toothed tiger named Diego (Denis Leary) with an unhealthy interest in taking the kid for himself. The three work out a deal to deliver the kid to its missing father. Diego's true motives are just the start of their trouble.
Basically an animated, kid-friendly version of the John Wayne cowboy flick "3 Godfathers," "Ice Age" presents a harsh winterscape of high imagination. An early example of a fully computer-animated movie produced not by Pixar or Dreamworks but the smaller Blue Sky Studios, "Ice Age" is remarkable for its tactile depiction of snow and water as well as the strange beasts long extinct that make up its cast.
It's not all that funny or engaging on its own. The banter is merry but tends to be unmemorable.
"How do we know it's the Ice Age," we hear one critter ask.
"Because of all the ice!" answers another.
The best things about the movie, beyond the sheer spectacle of it, are the voice work of the main actors and David Newman's infectious musical score. Co-directors Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha seem more amused by the plight of "Ice Age's" luckless critters than they have a right to be, particularly a poor sabre-tooth squirrel named Scrat whose attempts at securing an acorn unleash a lot of Chuck- Jones-style mayhem without the twisted joy of those classic cartoons of yore. Any time the action shifts to Scrat, I wince a little, but the kids will like it if they are anything like the twisted brats I know.
The film does get better as the relationships between the characters develop. The Diego story arc, as predictable and hokey as it is, pays off rather well. To enjoy "Ice Age," you have to believe in the threat behind the story, and Diego provides much of that. Leary is very good at working the menace into the jokes, and vice versa, though Leguizamo is easily the funniest of the trio, while Romano makes for a solidly enjoyable center.
Some things are not well explained, like the reason Manfred is so determined to journey north in the first place and why he puts up with the annoying Sid for so long. The film moves a bit too slow, even after it brings together our core foursome but especially before that. An emphasis on sentimentality, like multiple close-ups of the spritely Neanderthal baby and Manfred's backstory as revealed in some cave drawings, give "Ice Age" a weightiness it doesn't really earn. You just know the directors want to get the theater sniffling, as they admit in their DVD commentary.
The best scenes do have the power to bring out the kid in anyone. If Blue Sky ever opens their own Magic Kingdom, I hope they offer an ice-tunnel ride or Sid Slalom of the kind we get to enjoy here. The film plays too much to its core demographic that way, but I found it preferable at times to the more adult sensibility of snarky Shrek or the Pixar factory.