crat—half-squirrel, half-rat—just wants to bury his acorn. But when he pushes it into an icefield, it triggers a massive crack—then more, then more, until an entire glacier begins to move. The Ice Age is coming!
The smart mammoths, bison, sloths and rhinos begin heading south. But Sid the Sloth (Leguizamo) awakes to find that his family has left without him. Stumbling into the company of two irritable rhinos, Sid runs, smacking right into the furry rump of Manny the Mammoth (Romano). Manny—harboring a secret grief—is staying behind and is in no mood for a new pal.
Soto (Goran Visnjic) and his pack of saber-toothed tigers, meanwhile, are stalking a village of humans. Soto wants payback, and he tells Diego (Leary) to make sure he brings a baby back alive. "If I'm going to enjoy my revenge, I want it to be fresh," Soto growls.
Diego chases a mother and her infant to the top of a waterfall. Facing death on either hand, mom chooses to jump, leaving Diego frustrated. Soto is enraged. He warns Diego: Find the baby and bring him to me, or don't come back.
Still arguing, Manny and Sid are shocked when they reach the banks of the river. Mom, still cradling her infant, has washed up on the bank. She sees in Manny a kindred spirit. She pushes the baby to him. He takes it. Then mom is gone.
Manny just wants to leave. "Aren't you forgetting something?" Sid asks. "You saved him."
"I'm still trying to get rid of the last thing I saved," Manny says. But he takes the baby, cradling him in his trunk.
Diego finds them and, sensing an opportunity, offers to help them return the baby to its human herd. Manny's wary, but agrees that he needs Diego's ability to track. The unlikely quartet head off for Glacier Pass. Behind them, unseen, Soto and the sabertooths follow, biding their time.
The humor, like the ice, is dry
Fox, which abandoned traditional animation after the box-office failure of Titan A.E., plunges into the burgeoning computer-animated feature derby with Ice Age, an original story that is a worthy addition to the relatively new genre. It marks the feature-animation directorial debut of Wedge, one of the original animators on Tron and the Oscar-winning director of the computer-animated short Bunny.
Ice Age offers dry humor; a lovingly rendered 3-D Neolithic world; an epic story; and appealing characters voiced by TV veteran Romano, comic Leary and animation workhorse Leguizamo, who also played a role in Titan A.E. Romano and Leary, especially, bring a lot to this prehistoric party—both have a cynical delivery and wiseguy attitude that perfectly suit their wry characters. "Don't you have a nice defenseless animal to disembowel?" Manny asks Diego.
The story and situations are occasionally reminiscent of other animated films. Manny and Sid's relationship mirrors that of Donkey and his ogre pal Shrek a little too closely. Similarly, there are echoes of The Lion King in Diego's plotting with his saber-toothed compatriots, and Sid and Scrat's buggy-eyed expressions recall the 3-D creations of Chicken Run's Aardman Animations.
But some of Ice Age's cribbing works to good effect. In particular, Wedge et al. owe a big debt to the late and legendary Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones. The landscapes and rhythms of Ice Age would fit nicely in any Road Runner cartoon, and the hapless Scrat is the evolutionary forebear of Wile E. Coyote. Ice Age also tips its furry hat to The Honeymooners: Manny's exasperation with Sid echoes the relationship between Ralph and Norton.
In other ways, though, Ice Age evolves some original ideas. There's a lot of quick wit—walking past Stonehenge, Manny complains, "Modern architecture. It'll never last." A journey through an ice cave offers both sly evolution jokes and a thrilling action sequence, and an encounter with dodo survivalists is hilarious slapstick.
