Ice Age Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)July 2nd, 2002
Ice Age
Rental
I must remind my Constant Readers that I am a big animation maven, and so my comments should be taken with that in mind. I have spoken to plenty of people who enjoyed Ice Age more than I did, but I must be true to my gut and tell you that I cannot recommend spending more than $3 or so for this movie. It is, to my spoiled by Pixar mind, merely passable.
Ice Age has some high points (many of which center around the basically nonverbal prehistoric squirrel creature featured prominently in the preview) but uneven casting throw off any potential comedic fireworks. The voice talent is fine, although casting TV's Ray Romano in such a pivotal role as Manfred the Mastodon (mammoth?) I think undermined the potential comedy and strength of that character. Manfred came off very ill-tempered and sarcastic and sucked the joy out of a lot of scenes. I can't even quite explain why.
The story line, too, is perfectly acceptable; I don't wish to give anything away but here, an unlikely crew of creatures have undertaken a task to perform involving a rescued baby, and they have different motivations for doing so. Some of these motivations may be difficult to explain to a child, parents be warned. The gang is a tad outside of the margins of the Darwinian ideal of survival of the fittest (even taking anthropomorphism into account) and may deviate from the classic model of predator and prey. While the film actually attempts to address the prehistoric realities of these theoretical relationships, really it just ends up damaging the story. It's a freaking cartoon feature, we want predator and prey to be friends; if they keep reminding us they aren't supposed to be, why should we care when they succeed? Either sabretoothed tigers and sloths can be friends or they can't, but we all know what happens when humans show up, don't we?
A total side bar - it is interesting to note that the only creatures that survived until today are the human and John Leguizamo's three toed sloth; these characters are depicted as the most helpless and hapless, yet they manage to survive. Is this sly commentary? Probably not, but I am willing to accept that someone hoped to make it happen at one point in the film's evolution.
I also must note that considering that this film came out in 2002, a full 10 years after the awkward early computer animation forays in Disney's Aladdin, you would think the animation would have been better. There, I said it. However, again, it is completely competent, but the bar in this industry has been raised to obscene heights. Considering all the out of work programmers out there, there is no reason every movie can't look gorgeous. Nitpicky? You bet.
As another side bar, Yahoo lists the MPAA rating for this film as PG for "mild peril," an unintentionally Pythonesque comment on a totally unPythonesque film; perhaps Fox would have benefitted from such irreverence to its subject.
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These reviews (c) 2002 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks.
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