Deep Freeze
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor feels pilfered and stitched-together. There’s not an original bone in its entire furry body.
Its story, about cuddly and mismatched mammals forced to raise and return a lost human baby to its own “herd,” is a cross between Three Men and a Baby and Monsters, Inc. But it’s bereft of the former’s charisma and the latter’s energy; stuck in a frozen wasteland, it possesses all the vigor of a popsicle. And the film’s look demonstrates that the Blue Sky Studios team — including director Chris Wedge, responsible for the sweetly poignant Oscar-winning animated short Bunny in 1998 — apparently has lost its ability to delight and dazzle. It’s one more computer-generated bit of animation in which everything is intended to look real and surreal all at once; the humans look especially silly and slight, like sketches awaiting final animation. Even the soundtrack sounds secondhand: Instead of getting another Randy Newman Pixar-ready score, the filmmakers hired Randy’s cousin David.
Yet for all that, Ice Age is not entirely unlikable, because it’s ultimately bittersweet; it’s less a comedy than an accidental domestic drama dolled up in kiddie-merch drag. A resilient child nearly dies in the same river that claims his mother, finding his way home again to an embittered father figure whose faith must be restored. Astonishingly, it took two screenwriters to fashion so obvious and hoary a tale.
Ray Romano, all Jersey monotone, plays a mammoth named Manfred who refuses to migrate to sunnier climes with the other primitive mammals; he’s a sulky beast with a tragic secret he keeps to himself. While other parents and kids are heading away from the snow and playing in the muck (“You can play Extinction later,” an elephant pop tells his young ones covered in tar), Manfred sloshes toward certain doom, the reasons for which are explained later in a simple, moving scene played out with animated cave drawings.
Along the way, Manny picks up unwanted company: Sid, a gibber-gabbering sloth voiced by John Leguizamo, and Diego (Denis Leary), a saber-toothed tiger seeking the baby’s blood. Diego poses a greater threat than the encroaching snowstorm: He’s doing the bidding of his boss, Soto (ER‘s Goran Visnjic), and his fellow saber-tooths (including Jack Black), who want the baby and the mammoth as fresh meat. Diego will either betray his newfound partners or discover, at the last moment, a conscience.
The scenes in which these three unlikely partners raise their new child work best, displaying a rare, welcome tenderness. But Romano, Leary and Leguizamo seem to be talking at rather than to each other, stand-up comics doing shtick solely to impress the other guys. Better is the film’s squeaky squirrel, Scrat, who scampers through scenes in search of what appears to be the world’s last remaining acorn; he carries his nut, and the film, on his scrawny shoulders.
Pixar’s offerings dazzle without overdoing it, but Ice Age goes the opposite direction: Its look is almost boring. So, too, is much of its story. If only it didn’t feel the need to keep us laughing, the sad plight of big-studio animation, it might have kept on moving.
