top of page
Search

Film: Ice Age (Blue Sky, 2002)


Picture belongs to Blue Sky, who belong to Disney.

Ice Age is the first film in a large franchise - at the time of writing there are five films and several short animations, with a sixth film potentially planned.

Fundamentally, the first two Ice Age movies have an element of accuracy and educational value about the time period, then after that they totally jump the shark, forget about all that, and are about underground dinosaurs and UFOs.


All the Ice Age films are set in North America so they are useful to set the general scene of a large, cold land with mammoths and nomadic early humans, but neither Smilodon (sabre-toothed tigers) nor large sloths ever existed in Britain, so as that is two out of three of the main characters that isn't massively helpful to the cause of representing British history. There is also a short parade of "every Ice Age animal you have ever seen in a book called "Prehistoric Mammals"" near the start which doesn't even pretend to care about things like which 100,000 year period or continent all the various species lived in when it could have them all jostling side by side.



This picture also belongs to Disney.

Ice Age is a reasonably entertaining family film with a strong storyline about the value of forgiveness over revenge and a lot of fast-paced (often slapstick) action sequences to keep the attention. I particularly liked the way that the humans are portrayed - you see both their technology/village and their personhood (confusingly they are drawn looking quite Neanderthal around the face, but their general tech and the fact that even dubious evidence of Neanderthal settlement in America wasn't found until 2017 suggests otherwise),


Recent Posts

See All

DVD: Asterix and the Magic Potion

A CGI Asterix film (this version dubbed in English) loosely based on one of the books, but with a refreshing rewrite to include a girl as...

Comments


bottom of page