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This article is about a film. For information on continental glaciation, see Ice age.

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 sequel is called The Meltdown (2006).'

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, 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.

Plot

Soto, the leader of the Smilodon wants revenge on a group of human hunter-gatherers by eating a baby boy after the humans wipe out half of his pack of Smilodon for food and clothing. During the attack by the Smilodon pack (Soto, Diego, Zeke and two others) on the humans, the mother of the baby evades the cats by jumping into a raging river with her baby. She is dragged downstream, but manages to place the infant on an embankment before drowning. Enraged at having lost the baby in their attack, Soto orders Diego to find the baby and bring it to him alive.

Meanwhile most animals are trying to avoid the coming ice age by retreating to warmer climates. Sid, a clumsy ground sloth left behind by his family during the migration, is rescued from two brontotheres whom he angered by soiling their salad with glyptodont dung, flicking flecks of the dung at their face, insulting their intelligences, and eating their dandelion. Sid is soon saved by Manfred ("Manny"), one of the last remaining mammoths who fights off the two brontotheres. Not wanting to be alone and unprotected, Sid follows Manny, much to the mammoth's annoyance.

Sid and Manny spot the baby on the bank of the river and after much persuasion by the ground sloth, decide to return it to its tribe. However, when they get to the human camp, the humans have already left. Diego, still trying to snatch the baby, convinces the pair that he knows where the humans are going and offers his services as a tracker and a guide, which Manny accepts.

The trio take the baby across an assortment of different terrains and into several comedic situations. These include an army of dodos trying to escape extinction by eating watermelons; the trio venturing into a series of ice caves where they discover all sorts of odd things including a frozen Tyrannosaurus and even a UFO. In the end, Diego learns that it is wrong to harm a child and helps Manny and Sid help the baby back to his father. We also learn that Manny does not trust humans as they killed his wife and child (either that or they killed his parents- interpretations differ as to which of the mammoths in the cave paintings he sees as himself, but the sequel Ice Age: The Meltdown seems to imply it was his wife and child).

At the end of the film, Diego, Manny and Sid battle Soto's pack. First, Sid lures them away by skiing, then tricks them with a fake baby. Manny then knocks them out with a log or something similar. As Sid goes to retrieve the baby, Zeke follows him. But he fails to surprise them and Sid jumps on him, getting him stuck in the hollow where the baby hid. The battle ends with Manny trapped against the canyon wall as the pack close in for the kill, Diego leaps infront of them and fights against Soto. The fight is short and Soto easily knocks Diego against the rocks, knocking him out. As Soto closes in for the kill on Manny, and leaps towards the mammoth, with his sharp teeth extended. Diego, using his last ounce of strength leaps between Soto and Manny and it is he who is impaled by Soto's teeth. Diego falls to the floor and lies very still. Manny, angered by Diego's apparent murder, knocks Soto into the canyon wall, causing icicles from the ridge to fall. Soto looks up to see the icicles falling towards him and takes one last look of horror before being impaled and subsequently killed. Manny and Sid manage to return the baby to his father, and Diego, who had survived Soto's assault rejoins them as the group begin heading off to escape the Ice Age.

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.

Scrat

There is also a subplot where an animal named Scrat (compare a picture of Scrat and one of a tree shrew), 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 gets 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.

Deleted Portion

Warning: Deleted Scene spoilers follow
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 2 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 2-disc Special Edition DVD.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack features songs such as "Send Me on My Way" by Rusted Root. The Japanese release's theme song is "Hitoshizuku" by ZONE.

Controversy

Ivy Supersonic claims the Scrat character concept is a trademark infringement on her "Sqrat" as reported in 2002 on CNN by Jeanie Moos. Ivy's Sqrat is a combination character concept of a squirrel and a rat as new species and Ivy is credited with coining that term for New Yorkers to describe Central Park rodents in 2000, and a small product line of related items was available at that time. Since her trademark was established prior to the movie release of Ice Age, it would appear that 20th Century Fox attempted to skirt the concept, look and feel, and trademark by naming their adaptation as a "Scrat" spelled with a "c" rather than a "q", but the Squirrel/Rat composite was applied to the character now in the Ice Age movie. It is reported that Chris Wedge presented the "Scrat" after exposure to Ivy's Sqrat, and the movie producers liked it enough to take the risks associated with similarity to Ivy's Sqrat. This has spawned a heated debate in and out of court that is on-going. Please refer to http://scrat.com.

Counterpoint: Ivy trademarked the term "sqrat" in Nov. 2001, by which time the character design, name, and preliminary sketches of the character Scrat had already been completed (Ivy includes raw sketches of the final Scrat, dated Sep. 2001 on her site). 20th Century Fox changed the character name from Sqrat to Scrat, but since the creature is not described and the proper name Sqrat does not infringe on the descriptive term sqrat, they were not in actual trademark infringement. Trademark law protects uniquely specific logos and phrases, not unique pictures or artwork, which fall under copyright law. Ivy first filed a copyright on her drawing of a sqrat in Dec. 2001. Since the character design of her sqrat bears little resemblance to the character design already finalized in Sep. 2001, 20th Century Fox did not infringe on this registration either. While it may be true that Ivy coined the term and drew 2 logos in 1999, she tried to sell the concept to Hollywood before properly registering either trademark or copyright, and some Hollywood people used her concept as a starting point for their own unique work.

Conservative Christians have criticized the movie for allegedly promoting homosexuality, evolution and panspermia: two rhino-like animals are portrayed as a gay couple; Sid The Sloth having some gay traits such as kissing Diego and telling Manny his eyes are "beautiful"; Sid the sloth is seen walking through an ice cave in which his evolutionary ancestors are frozen into the wall; in the same cave a space ship is also frozen into the wall, suggesting that life was transported to earth from space; and the animals are portrayed as being of superior intelligence to the humans who supposedly have not yet evolved to the point where they can talk.

Inaccuracies

  • Dodos did not go extinct until far after the ice age were over, after people discovered them.
  • 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. The creators of Ice Age took qualities of the regular tree sloth of today and "Megatherium" and mixed them together.
  • Megatherium did not climb trees, as they were too big.
  • The two "rhinoceroses" are actually brontotheres, which went extinct before the ice age started.
  • The "aardvarks" actually look more like anteaters, except for the long ears.
  • 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.

Sequels

Animals Featured

Living Creatures

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)
  • There are also some unidentifiable, probably fictional animals among Sid's ancestors.

External links

2002 films | Anthropomorphic films | Films about animals | Computer-animated films | Family films | American films | Ice Age films | Comedy films | Adventure films

Ice Age | Ice Age | Η εποχή των παγετώνων (ταινία) | La era de hielo | عصر یخ | L'Âge de glace | L'era glaciale | Ledynmetis (filmas) | Ice Age | Istid (film) | Ice Age | Epoka lodowcowa (film) | Ice Age | Ледниковый период (мультфильм) | Ice Age | Ice Age

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Ice Age (film)".

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