Ice Age (film)

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Ice Age

DVD cover for Ice Age
Directed by Chris Wedge
Carlos Saldanha
Produced by John C. Donkin
Lori Forte
Christopher Meledandri
Written by Michael J. Wilson
Michael Berg
Starring Ray Romano
John Leguizamo
Denis Leary
Music by David Newman
Distributed by 20th Century Fox
Release date(s) March 15, 2002 (U.S.)
DVD: November 26, 2002
Running time 81 min
Language English
Budget $60,000,000 (est)
Followed by Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
IMDb profile
This article is about a film. For information on continental glaciation, see Ice age.

Ice Age is a feature-length computer-animated film created by Blue Sky Studios and released by 20th Century Fox in 2002. It was directed by Carlos Saldanha and Chris Wedge from a story by Michael J. Wilson. Its sequel is called Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006).

Contents

[edit] Characters

The characters are all prehistoric animals with the exception of some early humans (who bear some Neanderthal-like facial features, yet are not shown conversing, only grunting or yelling, and possess technology that is much more sophisticated). The animals can talk to and understand each other and are voiced by a variety of famous actors. What can also be noted is that, like many films of prehistoric life, the rules of time periods apply very loosely, as many of the species shown in the film never actually lived in the same areas, let alone the same time periods.

[edit] Plot including deleted scenes

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

[edit] Synopsis

The film begins with a wary saber-toothed squirrel called Scrat, who is shown trying to find a location for the hiding place of his acorn and finds one, in the snow, which was tightly packed and when receiving the acorn in its surface, cracked and caused a massive avalanche. Scrat runs off from this, but only just makes it, falling down a mountainside and being trodden upon by a massive column of animals moving south.

Meanwhile most animals are trying to avoid the coming ice age by retreating to warmer climates. Sid, a clumsy ground sloth left behind by his family during the migration, is attacked by two brontotheres whom he angered by soiling their salad with glyptodon dung, flicking flecks of the dung at their face, insulting their intelligences, and eating their dandelion. Sid is soon saved by Manfred ("Manny"), one of the last remaining mammoths who fights off the two brontotheres. Not wanting to be alone and unprotected, Sid follows Manny, much to the mammoth's annoyance.

Soto, the leader of the Smilodon wants revenge on a group of human hunter-gatherers by eating the chief Runar's baby boy, Roshan, because the humans had wiped out half of his pack of Smilodon for food and clothing. During the attack by the Smilodon pack (Soto, Diego, Zeke, Lenny and Oscar) on the humans, Nadia (Runar's wife and Roshan's mother) evades Diego who is pursuing her by jumping into a raging river with her baby. Enraged at having lost the baby in their attack, Soto orders Diego to find the baby and bring it to him alive.

Sid and Manny spot Nadia near the river bank having survived her brave escape she but manages to place the infant on an embankment before being swept by the current. After much persuasion by the ground sloth, they decide to return Roshan to his tribe. However, when they get to the human camp, the humans have already left. Diego, still trying to snatch the baby, convinces the pair that he knows where the humans are going and offers his services as a tracker and a guide, which Manny accepts.

The trio take Roshan (or "Pinky" as they often refer to him) across an assortment of different terrains and into several comedic and pertinent situations. These include an army of dodos trying to escape extinction by eating watermelons, the trio venturing into a series of ice caves where they discover all sorts of odd things including a frozen Tyrannosaurus and even a UFO, and a cave with human drawings of animals. However Diego is found by Zeke and Oscar who tell him of Soto's impatience; but Diego tells them that he is also bringing Manny and Sid to the Smilodon lair. In the end, Diego learns that it is wrong to harm a child and helps Manny and Sid help the baby back to his father. We also learn that Manny does not trust humans as they killed his wife and child.

At the end of the film, Diego, Manny and Sid battle Soto's pack. First, Sid lures them away by skiing, then tricks them with a fake baby. Manny then knocks them out with a log. As Sid goes to retrieve Roshan, Zeke follows him. But he fails to surprise them and Sid jumps on him, getting him stuck in the hollow where Roshan hid. The battle ends with Manny trapped against the canyon wall as the pack close in for the kill, Diego leaps in front of them and fights against Soto. The fight is short and Soto easily knocks Diego against the rocks, knocking him out. As Soto closes in for the kill on Manny, and leaps towards the mammoth, with his sharp teeth extended, Diego, using his last ounce of strength leaps between Soto and Manny and it is he who is impaled by Soto's teeth. Diego falls to the ground and lies very still. Manny, angered by Diego's apparent murder, knocks Soto into the canyon wall, causing icicles from the ridge to fall. Soto looks up to see the icicles falling towards him and takes one last look of horror before being impaled and subsequently killed. After seeing what happened to Soto, Oscar and Lenny run off in fear. Manny and Sid manage to return Roshan to Runar and his tribe, and Diego, who had survived Soto's assault (since cats have 9 lives, as he wryly put it), rejoins them as the group begin heading off to escape the Ice Age and move on to the South.

Alert viewers will notice the plot has some similarity to Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book (1967), though it also has a lot of themes and jokes from Three Men and a Baby.

During a speech given at the Tokyo Film Festival in 2006, producer Bill Mechanic stated, "I had been at Disney, we had success with Three Men and I thought we had picked the ice age as a good milieu, and then what story could we tell in there? And I thought the way to do it was Three Men and a Baby."

[edit] Deleted Portion

Originally, Sid was trying to avoid another sloth named Sylvia. He manages to lose her by putting her in the path of some migrating glyptodons, who unknowingly carried her off when she got caught on their backs, and again by making it look like Diego had killed him, but she saw he was faking, so she deserted him in anger. This segment was still used in the movie, but was used for Sid to avoid the two brontotheres who were still after him, as they fell for the trick. It was kept in the storybook version, however.
You can watch the deleted scenes separately, or in Nutty Movie Mode, both of which are included on Disc 1 of the two-disc Special Edition DVD.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Scrat

Main article: Scrat
Scrat
Scrat

There is also a subplot where an animal named Scrat (compare the picture of Scrat and one of a tree shrew), makes many comical attempts to bury his beloved acorn. His misfortunes include getting chased by an enormous glacier, being struck by lightning, attempting to thaw out the acorn by a fire too long so that it accidentally took the form of a kernel of popcorn, and finally getting cryonically frozen in an ice cube along with his much sought after nut. 20,000 years into the future, the ice cube washes up on the shore of an island. The sun slowly melts the cube, thawing Scrat and the ice surrounding his acorn, which is barely out of reach, and ends up being removed from the ice cube by the tide. Scrat then explodes out of the ice cube in anger and hits his head repetitively on a tree, which drops a coconut. Scrat's anger immediately turns to glee at this new find. He tries to pack it into the ground as he did previously with his acorns, but in the process causes a volcanic eruption.

Scrat is known to be similar to the prehistoric animal Leptictidium.

Scrat also got his own short film entitled Gone Nutty, where he loses his meticulously-organized collection of acorns in a catastrophic chain of events occurring after ramming his acorn into the hole in the exact middle of the collection. He remains with one which is reduced to an ashen crisp after it went crashing down on him with an impact like a missile.

[edit] Soundtrack

The soundtrack features songs such as "Send Me on My Way" by Rusted Root. The Japanese release's theme song is "Hitoshizuku" by ZONE.

[edit] Controversy

Ivy Supersonic claims the Scrat character concept is a trademark infringement on her "Sqrat" as reported in 2002 on CNN by Jeanie Moos. Ivy's Sqrat is a combination character concept of a squirrel and a rat as new species and Ivy is credited with coining that term for New Yorkers to describe Central Park rodents in 2000, and a small product line of related items was available at that time. Since her trademark was established prior to the movie release of Ice Age, it would appear that 20th Century Fox attempted to skirt the concept, look and feel, and trademark by naming their adaptation as a "Scrat" spelled with a "c" rather than a "q", but the Squirrel/Rat composite was applied to the character now in the Ice Age movie. It is reported that Chris Wedge presented the "Scrat" after exposure to Ivy's Sqrat, and the movie producers liked it enough to take the risks associated with similarity to Ivy's Sqrat. This has spawned a heated debate in and out of court that is on-going. Please refer to http://scrat.com.

Counterpoint: Ivy trademarked the term "sqrat" in Nov. 2001, by which time the character design, name, and preliminary sketches of the character Scrat had already been completed (Ivy includes raw sketches of the final Scrat, dated Sep. 2001 on her site). 20th Century Fox changed the character name from Sqrat to Scrat, but since the creature is not described and the proper name Sqrat does not infringe on the descriptive term sqrat, they were not in actual trademark infringement. Trademark law protects uniquely specific logos and phrases, not unique pictures or artwork, which fall under copyright law. Ivy first filed a copyright on her drawing of a sqrat in Dec. 2001. Since the character design of her sqrat bears little resemblance to the character design already finalized in Sep. 2001, 20th Century Fox did not infringe on this registration either. While it may be true that Ivy coined the term and drew 2 logos in 1999, she tried to sell the concept to Hollywood before properly registering either trademark or copyright, and some Hollywood people used her concept as a starting point for their own unique work.

Conservative Christians have criticized the movie for allegedly promoting homosexuality, evolution and panspermia each of which they claim is sinful: two brontotheres are portrayed as a gay couple; Sid The Sloth having some gay traits such as kissing Diego and telling Manny his eyes are "beautiful"; Sid the sloth is seen walking through an ice cave in which his evolutionary ancestors are frozen into the wall; in the same cave a space ship is also frozen into the wall, suggesting that life was transported to earth from space; and the animals are portrayed as being of superior intelligence to the humans who supposedly have not yet evolved to the point where they can talk. [1]

[edit] Inaccuracies

  • Dodos did not go extinct until far after the ice age were over, after people discovered them. In addition, they are supposed to only have existed on Mauritius and a few other islands in the southwest part of the Indian ocean.
  • Sid is too small and weak to be a Megatherium, thus dictating that he is of an actual subspecies which is about the size of a pig. The creators of Ice Age took qualities of the regular tree sloth of today and "Megatherium" and mixed them together.
  • The two "rhinoceroses" are actually brontotheres, which became extinct before the ice age started, as did many of the featured animals.
  • The "aardvarks" actually look more like anteaters, except for the long ears.
  • The term coined for one of the films' creatures were "freaky mammals", whose proper names are actually Xenorhinotherium.
  • Although Diego is constantly referred to as a tiger, he is actually a sabre-tooth cat, or Smilodon.
  • The humans depicted in the movie seem to be very well clad and in a way they could only have been dressed towards the end of the last ice age. Given the presence of armadillos as well as sloths which only existed in North America but in no other place where ice age people lived and, in addition, encountered ice and snow, the humans may have been early Native Americans who had come to North America only a brief time before. This could only have happened during the last ice age.

[edit] Sequel

[edit] Animals Featured

[edit] Living Creatures

Animals with an asterisk were extinct by the time the movie was set.

[edit] Dead or Frozen Creatures

  • Perch (flung at Manny's face at human camp site)
  • Tyrannosaurus (shown in ice cave)
  • Piranha (shown in ice cave)
  • Amoeba (shown in ice cave as Sid's ancestor)
  • Conodont (shown in ice cave as Sid's ancestor)
  • Eryops (shown in ice cave as Sid's ancestor)
  • Hapalops (shown in cave as Sid's ancestor)
  • UFO (in ice cave)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:


 v • d • e Blue Sky Studios
Feature-length animations

Ice Age (2002) • Robots (2005) • Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) • Horton Hears a Who! (2008)
Short films

Bunny (1998) • Gone Nutty (2003) • No Time for Nuts (2006)
Contributions in other films

Joe's Apartment (1996) • A Simple Wish (1997) • Alien: Resurrection (1997) • Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) • Jesus' Son (1999) • Fight Club (1999) • Titan A.E. (2000)
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