Ice Age (film)

Infobox Film
name = Ice Age

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caption = Theatrical Release Teaser
director = Chris Wedge
Carlos Saldanha
producer = John C. Donkin
Lori Forte
writer = Michael J. Wilson
Michael Berg
starring = Ray Romano
John Leguizamo
Denis Leary
distributor = 20th Century Fox
released = March 15 2002 (U.S.)
March 22 2002 (UK)
runtime = 81 minutes
country = USA
language = English
imdb_id = 0268380
amg_id = 1:258954
music = David Newman
budget = $60,000,000
gross = Domestic
$176,387,405
Worldwide
$383,259,213
followed_by = "" (2006)
website = http://www.iceagemovie.com/

"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 sequels are called ' (2006) and ' (2009). The film was originally to be directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, and produced in 2D by Fox Animation Studios, but the rise of CGI animation and the failure of "Titan A.E." destroyed Fox's traditional animation division, hence Bluth and Goldman transfered their duties for Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha from Fox's CGI division Blue Sky.

Plot

The film begins with a squirrel known as Scrat, who is trying to find a location to store his prized acorn. Eventually, as he tries to hide it, he causes an avalanche. He barely esapes, but finds him self crused by a ginet foot (not killed).The animals are trying to avoid the ice age by migrating south. Sid, a clumsy ground sloth left behind by his family, is attacked by two "Brontops" whom he angered. Sid is soon saved by Manfred ("Manny"), an agitated mammoth who fights off the two "Brontops". Not wanting to be alone and unprotected, Sid follows Manny.Meanwhile, Soto, the leader of the "Smilodon" pride wants revenge on a group of humans by eating the chief's son, Roshan, because the humans had wiped out half of his pack. During the attack by the "Smilodon" pack on the humans, the baby's mother evades the cats who are pursuing her by jumping into a waterfall. With that, Soto orders Diego to find the baby and bring it to him alive. Sid and Manny spot Nadia near the lake having survived her fall, having only enough strength to trust her baby to Manny before she disappears. After much persuasion by the sloth, they decide to return Roshan (nicknamed "Pinky") but when they get to the human camp, the humans are gone. Diego convinces the pair to let him help by tracking the humans. The four travel on, with Diego secretly leading them to an ambush. Soon they reach a cave where Sid and Diego learn about Manny's past and his previous interactions with the humans. At the end of the film, Diego, Manny and Sid battle Soto's pack and a short fight ensues. Diego fights against Soto, and Soto knocks Diego out. As Soto closes in for the kill on Manny, Diego leaps and stops Soto, who wounds Diego in the process. Manny, in vengeance, knocks Soto into a wall of rocks, where sharp icicles fall on Soto, fatally stabbing him. Manny and Sid manage to return the baby to his tribe, and Diego rejoins them, as the group begin heading off to warmer climates.20,000 years later, Scrat is shown on a tropical island, with a coconut to replace his lost acorn, but as he proceeds to pack the coconut, it causes a volcanic eruption. Originally, Sid was trying to avoid another sloth named Sylvia. He manages to lose her by putting her in the path of some migrating"Glyptodon", who unknowingly carry her off when she got caught on their backs. Later he makes 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. The deleted scenes can be viewed separately, or in Nutty Movie Mode, both of which are included on Disc 1 of the two-disc Special Edition DVD.

Scrat

There is also a subplot where an animal named Scrat 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. Believing it to be a giant acorn, 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, ultimately causing the tectonic shift.

Sequels

*"" was released on March 31 2006. The film focuses on the melting of a dam (due to, as Sid puts it at the end of the first film, Global warming) and the impeding flood.
*"" is set to be released on July 1 2009 which will focus on dinosaurs coming to Earth. The teaser trailer was released with the film Horton Hears a Who! featuring Scrat and his acorn.

Characters

The characters are all prehistoric animals. The animals can talk to and understand each other and are voiced by a variety of famous actors. 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.
* Manfred (Mammoth) — Ray Romano
* Sid (sloth) — John Leguizamo
* Diego ("Smilodon") — Denis Leary
* Soto ("Smilodon") — Goran Visnjic
* Zeke ("Smilodon") — Jack Black
* Oscar ("Smilodon") — Diedrich Bader
* Lenny ("Smilodon") — Alan Tudyk
* Scrat ( Fictional Saber-toothed squirrel) — Chris Wedge
* Carl ("Brontops") — Cedric the Entertainer
* Frank ("Brontops") — Stephen Root
* Rachel (Female sloth) — Jane Krakowski
* Jennifer (Female sloth) — Lorri Bagley

Animals Featured

Living Creatures

*Aardvark (red long-nosed creatures seen in the migration scene)
*"Brontops" (Carl, Frank, and many others in the migration) *
*"Canis" (guard dogs owned by humans)
*Dodo (an army of dodos were trying to escape from extinction by stock-piling watermelons)**
*"Glyptodon" (large armadillo-like creatures that were seen in the migration scene)*
*Synocnus (Sid and three females)
*"Macrauchenia" (yellow long-trunked creatures that were seen in the migration scene)*
*Mammoth (Manfred and five others seen in the migration scene)***
*Neanderthal (Roshan and his family)
*"Palaeotherium" (grey short-legged creatures seen in the migration scene) *
*"Scrat" (Laotian rock rat)
*"Smilodon" (Diego, Soto and other sabers)*

Animals with an asterisk were extinct by the time the movie was set.Animals marked with two asterisks are extint now.

Dead or Frozen Creatures

* Perch (flung at Manny's face at human camp site)
* "Tyrannosaurus Rex" (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)

References

See also

* List of computer-animated films
* List of animated feature-length films

External links

* [http://www.iceagemovie.com/original/ Official web site]
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* [http://www.yetifreestuff.com/movie_iceage.html First Ice Age Movie]