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The new Ice Age movie - the third in the series - is out this week. I confess I never thought the original had the makings of a franchise, but what do I know? Here's what I had to say in the Speccie back in 2002:
A prehistoric squirrel has a problem: he's got a fabulous acorn, but how to bury it? The ground is frozen solid, and the twitchy little feller scampers from spot to spot in the vast icy wilderness, issuing baffled grunts through his snaggleteeth and growing ever more frenzied in his efforts to jam the thing into the earth. Finally he jumps up and down on it, hammering it into the frost, and setting off an avalanche.
The crack in the ice runs across the landscape and zig-zags up the glacier behind him beginning a huge chain reaction across mountains and valleys and lakes and raining down an inferno of snow and ice. It's a wonderful prologue, an hommage to the late Chuck Jones of blessed memory. The squirrel has set off not just a great animated avalanche, but also a neat little movie.
The first rule of Jones cartoons is that your characters are driven by the same primal motivation again and again and again: Road Runner's relationship to Wile E. Coyote never alters, nor Sylvester's to Tweety Pie, and so it is with this squirrel and his acorn, as they pop up throughout the movie and, eventually, in a droll epilogue. But Jones rules don't apply in contemporary feature animation: if Disney ever re-made Road Runner - God forbid - he and Wile would have to demonstrate personal growth in the course of the plot; they would grow to respect each other and to realise that, whatever their differences, what binds them is stronger than what divides them; at the end of the picture, they would probably adopt.
So it is with Ice Age, whose script - three bachelors bond with baby - is essentially an animal version of John Ford's The Three Godfathers, made in 1916, remade in 1949. In movie terms, that is the ice age.
But, more to the point, Ice Age is half Shrek - small garrulous creature teams up with big grumpy creature for an animated road movie - and half-Monsters Inc - small garrulous creature and big creature team up to get cute human baby home to his or her rightful family.
In the Ice Age version, it's 20,000 years ago, the winter migration has begun and only a mammoth and a sloth have been left behind. In Shrek, the grumpy ogre kept trying to shake off the garrulous donkey. In Ice Age, the grumpy mammoth, Manfred, keeps trying to shake off the garrulous sloth, Sid. They're joined by a duplicitous sabre-tooth tiger, who has designs of his own on a human baby whom Manfred and Sid are trying to reunite with his family. Put like that, this sounds like every other lame-o PC animated snoozeroo of the last ten years. Indeed, its derivativeness is not even well done. As is traditional, the characters are voiced by funny-men, but the voices are bland and anonymous: unlike Shrek and Donkey, the characters never establish any real vocal identity, and their dialogue - 'You and me make a great team, Manny.' 'Isn't there someone else you can annoy?'- is generic cartoon banter. The squirrel, who doesn't say a word, is funnier than the others put together, and the real comic heart of the picture.
At least one character seems misconceived: the annoying sloth, with his machine-gun chatter, is most unslothlike. As a sloth who's been hitting the espresso all night, he could conceivably pass muster. But otherwise he exhibits no sloth characteristics. He seems to have been designated a sloth simply because all the available appealing furry animals have already been used. But don't worry about footling things like dialogue. The best thing about Ice Age is Chris Wedge's visual style. The animation is not technologically ambitious in the way that Shrek was, but it has a rich, distinctive look, especially in the icy sheen of the landscapes, the glistening surface of the frozen lakes. Wedge's characters have good touches - the sabre-tooth's Shere Khanlike jaw, the sloth's stick-on eyes, the mammoth's Vegas pompadour - but it's the land they inhabit that really springs to life. It comes into its own in several brilliantly choreographed set-pieces, notably the old characters-tumbling-down-an-underground-chute routine which Wedge transforms into a beautiful precis of every Winter Olympics sport except curling, all bundled together into one wild ride.
You know where it's going to go and, sure enough, pretty soon the mammoth, sloth and sabre-tooth are all helping each other out because 'that's what you do in a herd'. And, even though the sloth concedes 'we are the weirdest herd I've ever seen', that doesn't matter: just because you're an alternative herd doesn't mean you don't embody the best in traditional herd values. Is it a pitch for gay parenting? Probably. Is it anti-hunting? Definitely. 'If we save the baby, who do you think he's gonna hunt?' asks the sabre-tooth. 'Maybe if we save him he won't hunt us, ' suggests the sloth. But the tedious PC overlay is strangely poignant here, as if the characters are freighted with a sense of their own impending extinction. Yeah, I know that's not what most parents are looking for in a kids' cartoon, but it's something to think about in between the neurotic squirrel sequences.
from The Spectator, March 23rd 2002
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