ICE AGE (FILM)

'''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 ''Ice Age 3'' (2009).
''Ice Age'' was rated PG by the MPAA.

Contents

Characters

Plot details including deleted scenes

Synopsis

Deleted Portion

Scrat

Inaccuracies

Sequels

Animals Featured

Living Creatures

Dead or Frozen Creatures

See also

External links

Characters

The characters are all prehistoric animals with the exception of some early humans (who bear some Neanderthal-like facial features, yet are not shown conversing, only grunting or yelling, and possess technology that is much more sophisticated). The animals can talk to and understand each other and are voiced by a variety of famous actors. What can also be noted is that, 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 aka Manny (Mammoth) — Ray Romano

★ Sid (ground sloth) — John Leguizamo

★ Diego (Smilodon) — Denis Leary

★ Soto (Smilodon) — Goran Visnjic

★ Zeke (Smilodon) — Jack Black

★ Oscar (Smilodon) — Diedrich Bader

★ Lenny (Smilodon) — Alan Tudyk

★ Scrat (Saber-toothed squirrel) — Chris Wedge

★ Carl (Brontops) — Cedric the Entertainer

★ Frank (Brontops) — Stephen Root

★ Rachel (Female ground sloth) — Jane Krakowski

★ Jennifer (Female ground sloth) — Lorri Bagley
See also List of characters in the Ice Age films

Plot details including deleted scenes

Synopsis

The film begins with an animal 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.
In the beginning, most 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 brontotheres whom he angered. Sid is soon saved by Manfred ("Manny"), an agitated mammoth who fights off the two brontotheres. Not wanting to be alone and unprotected, Sid follows Manfred.
Meanwhile, Soto, the leader of the ''Smilodon'' wants revenge on a group of humans by eating the chief's baby, 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 Manfred spot Nadia near the lake having survived her fall, having only enough strength to trust her baby to Manfred before she dies. After much persuasion by the sloth, they decide to return the baby 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 that Manfred once had a wife and son, but lost them to humans.
At the end of the film, Diego, Manfred 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 Manfred, Diego leaps and stops Soto, who wounds Diego in the process. Manfred, in vengeance, knocks Soto into a wall of rocks, where icicles fall and kill Soto. Manfred and Sid manage to return the baby to his tribe, and Diego rejoins them, as the group begin heading off to warmer climates.
Years later, the Scrat is shown on a desert island, with a coconut to replace his lost acorn, but as he proceeds to pack the coconut, it causes another avalanche.
Alert viewers will notice the plot has some similarity to Disney's animated version of ''The Jungle Book'' (1967), though it also has a lot of themes and jokes from ''Three Men and a Baby''. During a speech given at the Tokyo Film Festival in 2006, producer Bill Mechanic stated, "I had been at Disney, we had success with ''Three Men'' and I thought we had picked the ice age as a good milieu, and then what story could we tell in there? And I thought the way to do it was ''Three Men and a Baby''."

Deleted Portion

Originally, Sid was trying to avoid another sloth named Sylvia. He manages to lose her by putting her in the path of some migrating glyptodons, who unknowingly carried her off when she got caught on their backs, and again by making 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. You can watch the deleted scenes separately, or in Nutty Movie Mode, both of which are included on Disc 1 of the two-disc Special Edition DVD.

Scrat

Main articles: 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. 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.

Inaccuracies

★ Dodos did not go extinct until far after the ice age was over, after people discovered them. In addition, they are supposed to only have existed on Mauritius and a few other islands in the southwest part of the Indian ocean.

★ Sid is too small and weak to be a Megatherium, thus dictating that he is of an actual subspecies which is about the size of a pig. It is thus unknown which species of sloth he truly is.

★ The two "rhinoceroses" are actually brontotheres, which became extinct before the ice age started, as did many of the featured animals.

★ The term coined for one of the films' creatures were "freaky mammals", whose proper names are actually ''Macrauchenia''.

★ Although Diego is constantly referred to as a tiger, he is actually a sabre-tooth cat, or ''Smilodon''. The Smilodon is, however, often referred to as the "sabre-tooth tiger."

★ The humans depicted in the movie seem to be very well clad and in a way they could only have been dressed towards the end of the last ice age. Given the presence of armadillos as well as sloths which only existed in North America but in no other place where ice age people lived and, in addition, encountered ice and snow, the humans may have been early Native Americans who had come to North America only a brief time before. This could only have happened during the last ice age.

Sequels

★ '' was released on March 31, 2006

★ ''Ice Age 3'' is set to be released on July 1, 2009

Animals Featured

Living Creatures

★ Aardvark (seen in the migration scene)

★ Alaskan husky (dogs owned by the humans)

★ Brontops (Carl and Frank, and many others in the migration)
★

★ Dodo (an army of dodos were trying to escape from extinction by stock-piling watermelons)

★ Glyptodont (large armadillo-like creatures that were seen in the migration scene)

★ ground sloth (Sid as well as three female sloths)

★ Macrauchenia (yellow long-trunked creatures that were seen in the migration scene)

★ Mammoth (Manfred)

★ Neanderthal (Roshan and his tribe)

★ Palaeotherium (gray short-legged trunked creatures that were seen in the migration scene)
★

★ Saber-toothed squirrel (Scrat) (fictional)

★ Smilodon (Diego)

★ Toxodon (large blue hippopotamus-like creatures that were seen in the migration scene, shown not in the film but on the official website)
★
Animals with an asterisk were extinct by the time the movie was set.

Dead or Frozen Creatures

★ Perch (flung at Manny's face at human camp site)

★ ''Tyrannosaurus'' (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)

See also

★ List of characters in the Ice Age films

★ List of animated feature-length films

★ List of computer-animated films

External links

★ Official web site

★

★

★

★

★

★ Ice Age Fan Club on Bebo