"It's so hard to find a male who wants to breed . . . (Ice Age (DVD))

Member Name: gollygumdrops

Product:	Ice Age (DVD)
Date:	23/03/02 (270 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Its fun

Disadvantages: Monsters Inc is better

. . . all the sensitive ones get eaten".

Well it amused me anyway. This film kept me and my team of mini reviewers amused for an hour and a half, and was pronounced to be worth 'eighty million points'. The scale isn't really much help in dooyoo terms. They recommended sixty zillion out of five when asked to be more precise.

A more meaningful assessment would perhaps be that Ice Age should get less points than Monsters Inc, but more than that old cartoon thing (some form of animated Christmas Carol movie they wanted to watch because it had some famous bird and Nic Cage doing the voice acting) that we saw before Christmas.

I'd have to agree. Ice Age is fun, but it's no Toy Story. Whilst the characters we do meet, and there's only really four you get to know, are nicely rounded and entertaining to watch, there's not much development of extra characters. The neurotic squirrel that you'll see advertising the film is just a bit part player who sets up and seals down the film. Other characters that appear on posters are only in the movie for a matter of minutes.

More annoyingly there are no female leads. The only 'women' we do get to meet are a rather weedy mother who saves her baby only to disappear forever, and a couple of three toed sloth hotties who show up in a hot tub and bitch about the lack of good men. Perhaps I'm expecting too much of kids films to provide balanced animated role models!

The voice acting is great, and I can never imagine a mammoth with any other voice than that of the slightly depressed 'Raymond', you know, the one Everyone Loves. The animation is great, particularly in the big action ice slide scene which had my mini olympians praying for snow so we could go sledding. The BBC has a lot to answer for after showing skeleton at prime time.

The Ice Age storyline is the classic sloth meets mammoth, sloth attacked by gay rhinos, mam
moth saves sloth, mammoth hates sloth, sloth and mammoth save baby from sabre tooth tigers, sabre tooth tiger tricks sloth and mammoth but all turns out well in the end kinda buddy road movie. It does have a lot to say about accepting peoples differences and playing to everyones strengths, so it does redeem itself in some ways.

Ice Age does make full use of the big screen, so it is worth seeing it there rather than waiting to rent it, but if you only plan one movie trip this Easter go see Monsters Inc. If your local cinema offers a holiday/Saturday £1.50 kids special then wait for that before paying full price for Ice Age.

It seems, after careful analysis of the trailers, that Snow Dogs looks like dog poo and Jimmy Neutron is for nerd babies, so the next film I've been booked to act as 'responsible adult' for is Stuart Little 2.

Summary: