Ice Age is an American animated film directed by Chris Wedge. It was the first computer animated film produced by Blue Sky Studios. 20th Century Fox became the distributor of it, making it 20th Century Fox's eleventh full-length animated theatrical feature film.
Released on March 15, 2002, the film received mostly positive reviews and started the long franchise. Manny, a woolly mammoth; Sid, a ground sloth; Diego, a Smilodon; and Scrat, a saber-toothed squirrel, became the main characters of this film and it’s sequels.
Plot[]
Scrat, a small sabre-toothed squirrel, runs along the glacier and tries to hide his acorn. By trampling it into a dense crust, Scrat creates a long crack, which causes the glacier to collapse. The animal barely escapes from the ice masses, falls from a great height, and numerous mammals migrating south trample him. Manny, a woolly mammoth, goes in the other direction, which displeases other mammals.
Nearby, Sid, a ground sloth, wakes up in a tree to find that he has slept through the start of the migration and his family has left without him. Offended, Sid steps in the Glyptodon’s feces and stains the dandelion that Frank, the Megacerops, and Carl, the Embolotherium, wanted to eat. Enraged, they chase Sid, but he accidentally finds Manny. The mammoth tries to drive away the perissodactyls, but in the end he slides off the cliff together with Sid. Happy to be alive, Sid decides to stay with the mammoth.
That same evening, saber-toothed tigers observe a tribe of people. Soto, a large Smilodon, wants revenge on the leader of the people who killed half of his pack. Diego, another Smilodon, agrees to attack at dawn and kidnap the leader's son. The next morning there is an attack. Diego, as planned, secretly sneaks into the leader's home, but his wife runs away, saving the child. Diego runs after her, but the woman suddenly jumps into the waterfall. Soto is angry, but Diego promises to find the child and bring him to the mountains, while the rest of the pack runs away and distracts people with them.
Manny is not very happy with Sid's presence. He did not allow the sloth to spend the night near him, but Sid still accompanies him everywhere. Approaching the river, they unexpectedly find a woman who leaves a child on the bank, and then, having lost strength, floats away with the flow. Sid decides to return the child to the tribe. The mammoth at first refuses to go with him, but, seeing how awkwardly Sid is trying to climb onto the cliff, he tries to help. At this moment, Diego appears and grabs the child, but Manny takes him away. Realizing that he is powerless against the huge proboscidean, Diego assures that he also wanted to return the child to the people. Manny doesn't believe him and agrees to help Sid get the child back. When they get up, they find that the people have abandoned their camp, and then Diego offers to take them a shortcut to another human camp. Manny agrees. Diego initially plans to steal the baby while Manny sleeps, but later decides that the entire pack of saber-tooth tigers can defeat the mammoth and they can have a good meal. Diego tells the plan to Oscar and Zeke, two other Smilodon who found him at night, and they run away to Soto, who is already waiting at the designated place.
Manny, Sid and Diego carry the child through mountain valleys and snowy plains. Along the way, they take away a watermelon for the child from the greedy dodos, and Sid meets Carl and Frank again. By pretending to be dead in Diego's jaws, he finally gets rid of his pursuers. Later, Diego, wanting to avoid an unnecessary meeting with people, takes the mammoth and Sid to a cave, where they almost lose the child, but catch him while sliding down the ice slides. Before going outside, Sid finds cave paintings of Manny and his family, who were once killed by people. Realizing that the human child is also dear to his father, Manny is finally convinced that the child must be returned to his family. Several times during this long journey, Scrat appears near the characters. He is still trying to hide the acorn in a safe place, but every time something interferes with him.
At this time, people lose track of saber-toothed tigers. Realizing that winter is approaching and it is too late to go back, the leader decides to go to the winter camp.
Manny, Sid and Diego almost reach the gorge, but at that moment the volcano begins to erupt right below them. Manny helps Sid jump over the lava flow and helps Diego out, who almost falls. Shocked by the help provided, Diego begins to doubt that the mammoth and the child should be given to Soto. He spends another night around the fire with Sid, Manny and the baby. The next day, when there is very little left to the trap, Diego finally warns Manny and Sid about the danger. They manage to outwit the sabre-toothed tigers and hide the child, but Diego himself loses the fight with Soto. Having improved the moment, Manny throws Soto against the wall of ice and he dies under the falling icicles. Oscar and Lenny the Homotherium escape, and Zeke, outwitted by Sid, gets stuck in a narrow cave. Near death, Diego says that he was glad to make friends with Manny and Sid.
The mammoth and the sloth continue journey with the child and finally catch up with the people. Manny returns the child to his father and leader, to celebrate, hangs his wife’s necklace on Manny’s tusk. Sid and Manny wave at the people, and then Diego approaches them, weak but alive. The saber-toothed tiger and the child manage to see each other for the last time, and then the educated Sid hugs Diego tightly. Deciding not to separate, the three friends go south together, and Sid confidently declares that global warming will soon begin.
Epilogue[]
20,000 years later, an ice floe containing frozen Scrat and an acorn floats onto a tropical coast. Scrat is gradually thawing and cannot reach the acorn. When a wave rolls in and carries the acorn out to sea, Scrat breaks the remaining ice in despair, hits his head on a palm tree, and a coconut falls near him. Scrat tries to bury it in the ground instead of an acorn and creates a crack that reaches the crater of the volcano and causes an eruption. Scrat looks at the volcano and chuckles nervously.
Cast and characters[]
A screenshot from the first film. From left to right: Sid, Manny and Diego.
Scrat
- Ray Romano as Manfred "Manny", a lonely woolly mammoth whose family was killed by humans before the events of the film. Despite this past, he agrees to help Sid return their child to the people.
- John Leguizamo as Sid, an absent-minded and clumsy ground sloth. Before the migration began, he was abandoned by his own family.
- Denis Leary as Diego, a Smilodon. Initially loyal to his pack, Diego later becomes friends with Manny and Sid after they help him escape a lava flow.
- Goran Višnjić as Soto, a Smilodon. The cruel leader of a pack of saber-toothed cats, thirsting for revenge on people.
- Jack Black as Zeke, a small grey Smilodon.
- Diedrich Bader as Oscar, a Smilodon.
- Alan Tudyk as Lenny, a Homotherium.
- Tudyk also voiced the dodo scout, the Macrauchenia #1.
- Stephen Root as Frank, a Megacerops.
- Root also voiced the Moeritherium father.
- Cedric the Entertainer as Carl, an Embolotherium.
- Jane Krakowski as Rachel, a female ground sloth.
- Lorri Bagley as, Jennifer, a female ground sloth.
- Chris Wedge as Scrat, a saber-toothed squirrel. Scrat cannot speak and appears in several scenes trying to hide his acorn.
- Wedge also voiced Dab, the serious leader of a flock of dodos
- Tara Strong as Roshan, a human child. His name is not spoken in the film.
- [Actor is unknown]. Eddie, a Glyptodon that falls off a cliff.
Species:[]
- Woolly mammoth
- Macrauchenia
- Moeritherium
- Glyptodon
- Anteater
- Unnamed ground sloth
- Megacerops
- Embolotherium
- Neanderthal
- Smilodon
- Homotherium
- Canis familiaris
- Dodo
- Piranha (frozen)
- Tyrannosaurus (frozen)
- Various fishes (frozen)
Development[]
The film was intended to be a dramatic adventure, but later more comedic scenes were added to the script. In the original version, Scrat died at the very beginning under the foot of a mammoth, and Diego died after a fight with Soto. After being shown to a test audience, both characters remained alive. Some scenes were not included in the final version, including the conversation between Diego and the other saber-toothed tigers after the first scene with Soto, as well as Sid's meeting with Sylvia, his tempted annoying girlfriend.
Box office[]
In its first week of release, Ice Age grossed $46.3 million, making it the third-best-opening animated film at the time (after Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 2). The film grossed over $176 million in the United States and nearly $383.5 million worldwide.
Soundtrack[]
The film's soundtrack was released on May 14, 2002, and features music performed by David Newman. The song "Send Me on My Way" is featured in the film, but was not included on the official album.
Video game[]
In 2002, Ubi Soft released the Ice Age game for the Game Boy Advance platform. The game allows to play as Manny or Sid, and at each of the 10 levels, the player needs to collect as many nuts as possible. The game received mixed to negative reviews.
Trivia[]
- Scrat was conceived as a parody of saber-toothed predators of the Pleistocene epoch and had no real analogues. However, in 2011, nine years after the premiere of this film, Cronopio, a saber-toothed mammal similar to Scrat, was found in the Cenomanian (Upper Cretaceous) deposits of Argentina.
- This is the only film of the franchise (except the short films No Time for Nuts and Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas) in which humans appear.
- Lost in a cave, Sid finds a frozen piranha, a non-avian dinosaur, another ground sloth, and a spaceship. All of these animals (or their relatives) and the spaceship appear in the next four sequels in the same sequence in which Sid finds them.