The impressive second sequel is one of the rarest breeds of motion pictures, surpassed in elusiveness probably only by the impressive second animated sequel. The original film introduced some quirky and lovable characters, an unlucky but determined squirrel named Scrat (who probably started out as an idea for a short film to precede the movie), and ultimately descended into an obligatory Hollywood ending that was just about as cheesy as you could imagine. The second movie dealt with the transition period between the Ice Age and the Thawed Age, with a towering wall of ice surrounding the beautiful valley where the animals lived, every day thawing and getting closer and closer to collapse. And all the while the wooly mammoths Manny and Ellie are awkwardly trying to date each other.
In fact, it’s important to consider this dating ritual that Manny and Ellie go through. They are prehistoric animals and yet interact with each other not only like people, but like American teenagers. No complaining, then, about the fact that the movies are hardly historically accurate. Yeah, the third movie places mammoths and saber-toothed tigers before the age of dinosaurs, but come on, there were humans in the first movie. Nevertheless, paleontologists are sure to be unimpressed.
One of a great many scenes in the movie made no less amusing by its lack of realism.
What I do love about the third movie, however, is that it takes the artistic freedom afforded to it by this tendency not to adhere itself to naturalistic fact, and it just has fun with itself. Our cast of characters are an unlikely bunch, to be sure. We have the mammoths Manny and Ellie (voiced once again by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah), the saber-toothed tiger Diego (Dennis Leary), the two possums Eddie and Crash (Josh Peck and Seann William Scott), and of course, the lovable sloth Sid (John Leguizamo).
Manny and Ellie are now a doting young couple with a baby on the way, which changes the dynamics of the herd to such an extent that Sid begins to feel left out and pines for his own family. Without the benefit of a singles bar for sloths, Sid stumbles across three dinosaur eggs in an ice cave and determines to hatch them and raise them as his own.
Sid the Sloth - proud mother of three healthy tyrannosaurs.
A curious goal, but it leads to one of the movie’s most thrilling sequences, an accidental snow-skiing scene which finds Sid flying out of control down the snowy side of a mountain trying to keep the eggs from breaking, and ultimately leads to the whole herd being chased into the movie’s big artistic creation, a massive underground world reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World,” but more closely resembles the subterranean world of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Helping them along the way is their guide, a weasel named Buck (voiced by Simon Pegg), who lives in the underground world, unaware of any other.
There are plenty of reasons to slam the third Ice Age movie as a money grab made for no other reason than because a T-rex looked good on the movie poster, but there are many more reasons to sit back and take in the incredible animated creations that are put forth in it and allow yourself to accept it as a high entertaining, if not exactly educational, piece of family fun. The adventures that our heroes encounter in this extraordinary underground world are wonderfully imagined and beautifully animated, easily surpassing the mediocre realization of Jules Verne’s brilliant classic novel into the bonehead 2008 film Journey to the Center of the Earth.
I read one critic who claims that most of the comedy in the movie is uninspired, which is truly a bizarre statement because the comedy in Ice Age 3 is by far the best written of the series so far. I was amazed on several occasions that they were able to fit in some jokes that are of a completely adult nature (one of which involved the prospect of dinosaur castrations) without ever becoming inappropriate for the kids. Uninspired my ass, that’s how you make the adults in the audience have as much fun as the kids.
Ice Age 3 is successful because its purpose is clearly to entertain as a piece of light-hearted entertainment and it doesn’t shoot for a Best Animated Feature nomination. The movie will not be represented at the Oscars next year, but it is enormously entertaining and is so well written that it is able to deal with every adult situation from child-birth (this is the only animated movie I can think of that actually shows a child-birth – albeit a wolly-mammoth one – onscreen) to Diego’s difficulties with getting older. It manages to juggle these concepts with the more childish ones – like the impossibly cute dinosaur babies – in such a way as to entertain the kids and the adults at the same time, and this is one of the most difficult things for an animated film to do.
The Bean Meter
3.5 Beans out of 5.
