Ice Age
Rated: PG
Director: Carlos Saldanha and Chris Wedge
Starring: Raymond Romano, Denis Leary, John Leguizamo, Jack Black
Parental Notes: This film contains Roadrunner-and-Coyote style violence in small doses, and several intense sequences which might upset younger children.
There’s a moment in “Ice Age” when a scrat (a sort of squirrel-rat hybrid) realizes he is doomed. He stares up at the mountain of ice about to fall on him and his lower eyelid twitches faintly. It doesn’t matter that his appearance is artistically mediocre, we laugh. “Ice Age” may not be a work of artistic or storytelling genius, but when it comes to details and raw visual humor, it delivers with extra to spare.
The main story of the film has nothing to do with the scrat. It follows Manny, a mammoth; Sid, a sloth; and Diego, a wonderfully irritable saber-toothed tiger as they attempt to return a lost human infant to his “herd.” The scrat is a sort of mammalian running joke, appearing from time to time to make us fall out of our chairs as he tries desperately to bury a series of acorns only to meet some new, extreme problem each time (lightening strikes, explosions, and herds of large animals feature prominently).
The story is riddled with the clich