The major studios learned from the flops of Titan A.E. (2000) and The Road to El Dorado (2000), and the huge success of Shrek (2001). The audience for animated films is predominantly children, and they want laughs even more than adventure.

Ice Age is clearly targeted at children, with a small dose of morality to help their adult guardians get through the film. Usually one wacky sidekick is enough, but Ice Age needed to make sure, so an obsessive, stupid squirrel joins the silliness along with an obnoxious weasel-like sloth (John Leguizamo) and a bunch of easily excited dodo birds. Never mind that dodo birds, along with rhinos and watermelons, were native to a tropical environment.

As kid entertainment, Ice Age certainly delivers. There's action, comedy, adventure, comedy, homilies about the importance of friendship, comedy, a baby in peril, and comedy. Most of the comedy is of the slapstick variety, such as an encounter with an unlikely bobsled track in a cave. There's plenty of insult dialogue as well, usually delivered by the larger animal at the expense of the smaller animal. What's deliberately missing is romance, since the target audience could not care less.

Ice Age succeeds in mass juvenile entertainment, and has made a pile of money as well. But pleasing a targeted audience does not necessarily make a film good, or else critics would fall all over the sadistic Faces of Death videos. When a film panders to its audience, it exposes its flaws and prejudices. Tigers are bad animals, because they're big enough carnivors to eat people. (Lions also eat people, but as they look adorable, at least at a distance, they are good animals in children's cartoons.)

Our heroes tramp through ice and snow for days to return a lost infant, because it's the right thing to do, and the only one of them who gets hungry is the baby. Who only gets hungry once, and quickly gets something to eat. Although the tiger drools at the possibility of consuming the baby, he considers it more of a dessert than a meal.

The story is a pastiche of borrowed formulas that date as far back as the silent era. Begin with The Three Godfathers (1916), then add the western/adventure genre formulas of wacky sidekicks, bullies, and taciturn heroes. You end up with a movie that is competent, and even well crafted. But aside from a brief cave painting sequence that has magic clearly absent elsewhere, you have another dreary crowd pleaser. It will be celebrated for a month and then forgotten. (43/100)

Visit me at filmsgraded.com

Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8