Chilly Style

Ice Age doesn’t break any ground, but it’s a frosty treat all the same.

Directed by Chris Wedge
A 20th Century Fox release
Opens Friday at area theaters

recommended

By Sam Adams

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ARCHIVES . Articles

March 14–21, 2002

movies

Chilly Style

Ice Age doesn’t break any ground, but it’s a frosty treat all the same.

Directed by Chris Wedge
A 20th Century Fox release
Opens Friday at area theaters

recommended

By Sam Adams



ICICLE REPAIR: John Leguizamo’s Sid is one wild and crazy sloth.

So there’s this squirrel, right? And he’s trying to get this acorn. Only thing is, it’s cold. Real cold. Like the Ice Age, dig? Of course, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’re already hip to the squirrel’s shenanigans. Rather than go with a conventional approach, Fox’s marketing team wisely opted to simply excerpt the first few minutes of Ice Age , thus drumming up excitement in just about everyone who found out I was going to see the movie. "Oooh, the one with the squirrel?"

The squirrel — named Scrat, according to the credits, with excited squeaks "voiced" by director Chris Wedge — is, unfortunately, not one of Ice Age ’s protagonists. That distinction belongs to a trio of misfits: a mopey, solitary mammoth named Manfred (Ray Romano), an abandoned sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo) and Diego (Denis Leary), a voracious saber-toothed tiger that just might turn out to have a heart of gold. Thankfully, though, that squirrel keeps turning up, chasing after his acorn despite being frozen, pummeled, stomped and visited with all manner of bodily harm. Even if I hadn’t seen the movie a few days after the death of the great Chuck Jones, the comparison with his kinetic, anarchic Looney Toons might well have sprung to mind all the same. Ice Age is yet another entry in the voguish world of digital animation, but its creators (Blue Sky Studios, best known for the Oscar-winning short Bunny ) haven’t forgotten the elemental slam-bang virtues that make the best cartoons tick.

Ice Age is sappy, to be sure, and more than a hair too self-conscious. The movie’s characters are knowing and hip in that millennial way; rather than plumb, even comically, the mechanics of Ice Age society, they opt for easy, off-the-cuff jokes (à la Shrek ) and Jungle Book camaraderie.

The story is fairly simple (and fairly reminiscent of Monsters, Inc. ). Manfred, not the social type, has split off from his herd and decided to head north for the winter, the him, latches onto the big woolly fella as his protector, a relationship that becomes more necessary once the two accidentally come into possession of a human baby (whose mother, unbeknownst to them, has been knocked over a waterfall by a pack of saber-toothed tigers). The glum Manny and the hyperkinetic Sid — Leguizamo plays the Eddie Murphy role better than Eddie Murphy — are joined by Diego, who ostensibly offers to lead the two of them to the child’s tribe, but more obviously is setting them up so the rest of his pack can move in for the kill.

So far, so predictable, and further still. But Ice Age is still heaps of fun, mainly for Leguizamo’s characterization and the filmmaker’s consistently deft touch for physical comedy (even if their backgrounds are pretty flimsy compared with what we’ve come to expect). And, of course, there’s that darn squirrel, who keeps turning up and giving the picture a lift just when he’s most needed. What a relief that they didn’t become extinct.