You’ve all seen the trailers, they were cute and funny with a small furry creature, but the question remained, “Will Ice Age Deliver the funnies?” In a word, yes. Unlike the last animated film I saw, Return to Never Land, Ice Age is entertaining for people of all ages, not just those under the age of say 12.

The movie begins with the funny little creature and its acorn scratching and sniffing as it does in the trailer. Soon we are introduced to Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo from Collateral Damage), an unpopular sloth with a lisp. He seems to always be screwing things up and causing problems, so the rest of his family left without him for the southern migration. The first thing Sid does is get two rhinos pissed off at him, however he survives with the help of a loner wooly mammoth named Manfred (Ray Romano of Everybody Loves Raymond). Manfred dislikes Sid as well, but doesn’t like killing, which is why he saves Sid from the rhinos. Manfred isn’t into heading south, and since Sid has nobody else, the two head north together. Meanwhile a camp of humans have been busy hunting saber tooth tigers in the area, so now the remaining pack of tigers are looking for revenge. Soto (Goran Visnjic, The Deep End) is in charge of the pack and wants the human’s lone infant for a meal, and so he sends his trusted confidant Diego (Denis Leary, True Crime) after the child. After a furious chase the mother and child escape Diego by jumping over a waterfall into the pool below. The two survive the jump, but the mother has just enough energy remaining to hand her child over to a pair of strangers, Sid and Manfred, before disappearing into oblivion. Sid wants to find the human camp and return the lost kid, while Manfred doesn’t want anything to do with the kid, or even Sid for that matter. Then Diego arrives offering to return the kid, but Manfred and Sid do not trust him, so they decide to return the kid with Diego leading the way, but is it a trap?

Ice Age is wonderfully guided by directors Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, while Michael Berg wrote the screenplay based on a story by Michael Wilson. Other voices in the film are Cedric the Entertainer (Dr. Dolittle 2), Tara Strong, Jack Black (Orange County), Lorri Bagley, Josh Hamilton, Stephen Root (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), Peter Ackerman, and Alan Tudyk.

Ice Age is a very funny movie, most of the time. Manfred and Sid provide most of the laughs, with some assistance from that small saber tooth chipmunk thing that is in the trailers, he/she has lots of adventures involving that acorn. One drawback is the filmmakers had to do the sappy lesson at the end, which was touching, but a bit boring. So all-in-all, Ice Age was quite entertaining and receives nine couches out of a possible ten.

Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:47:50 AM

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