Movie Info
Movie Name: Ice Age
Studio: Blue Sky Studios
Genre(s): Animated/Comedy/Family
Release Date(s): March 15, 2002
MPAA Rating: PG
A mammoth’s tragic tale…
Winter is coming and the animals are headed south…except one determined mammoth named Manny. When Manny is forced to team up with a giant ground sloth named Sid and a suspicious sabretooth tiger named Diego to return a human baby to its father, he finds himself part of a new herd with new problems.
Directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, Ice Age was nominated for Best Animated Feature (losing to Spirited Away). The computer animated film started a franchise and received mostly positive reviews. It features the voices of Ray Romano (Manny), Denis Leary (Diego), John Leguizamo (Sid), and additional voices from Alan Tudyk, Cedric the Entertainer, Stephen Root, Jane Krakowski, Goran Visnjic, and Jack Black. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
I really wish he’d just eat them all
Ice Age follows a rather normal format of movies set in the past. It has a group of unsual characters travelling together through dangerous lands. The characters learn to like each other despite their differences and most (except in this case the dim Sid) are hiding something about their past. It is a rather tired format.
I am not a big fan of the voice actors in the film. People loved Everyone Loves Raymond…I wasn’t one of them and Ray Romano’s voice is like knives to the brain to me. Having to listen to him here doesn’t help. John Leguizamo has been on my “most annoying actors” list since Spawn. Dennis Leary is ok, and I do like some of the supporting cast…but it doesn’t outweight the Romano factor.
A tough nut to crack…
The best part of the Ice Age movie is the fun movie-within-a-movie about a squirrel thing named Scrat trying to hide his precious acorn. While this is possibly the best part of the movie, there is a problem that this part of the story was put in trailers and overplayed. It makes a nice short, but doesn’t always mesh well with the main story.
Ice Age doesn’t do much for me. I’m so-so on Dennis Leary, but really don’t like John Leguizamo or Ray Romano so having to listen to them the whole time is a bit of a struggle. Ice Age isn’t a bad film, but I’ve seen other films do kind of the same story better…creatures interacting with kids in Monsters, Inc. and Ice Age also has a bit of Dinosaur and The Land Before Time with animals teaming-up to survive extinction. With the bleak setting, the animation also isn’t the most fantastic animated scenes you’ll ever see. Ice Age was followed by Ice Age: The Meltdown in 2006.
