Last week I read a review of Ice Age by Brad Gruigar (of Grey Stone Inn). He said that while the movie was okay he wasn't very entertained and the he'd rather have gone to see Residence Evil instead.
I have to disagree with him on this, I found Ice Age to be a really funny film, I wold agree with him that the escapism wasn't really there, but it made up for it with laughs, which frankly save a film for me.
A bit of info: Ice Age is set at the beginning of the last Ice Ae (or at least I assume) in which all the various animals on the Earth are migrating away from the all the ice. A mammoth called Manford (who we assume has lost his family) becomes lumbered with a clutzy sloth called Sid. The two of them rescue a human baby (whom they call Pinky because of his skin colour). A sabre-tooth tiger named Diego wants to gets his paws on the baby because the boss of his pack wants to eat the baby in retribution for what its father did to half of his pack (hunted & killed them).
As Diego can't take on a fullgrown mammoth, he tricks Manny and Sid into heading off to a trap, where his pack will not only get the baby, but also a mammoth meal, with a side order of sloth.
Needless to say along their journey to the trap there is lots of bonding and the trap doesn't happen as originally planned.
The jokes in the film are both silly and in places surreal, and sequences such as those involving survival-obsessed dodo's made me laugh out loud, along with my friends Joff and Darren sitting next to me. The films two comic relief specialists are Sid the sloth and an anorexic prehistoric squirrel (never got a name) who appears constantly throughout the film trying to protect and hide just one nut in a multitude of places, often creating avalanches as a side effect. Its the utter pathetic qualities of these two that make them funny and also make you feel sorry for them..but also feel proud when they come out on top of the larger more adapted animals throughout the movie.
Another quality of the movie that Brad Gruigar disliked was the staleness of the CGI prehistoric humans. I have to agree with him here, they are rather basic, not the rendering in any imagination, but the CGI acting is so stiff and inhuman that at times you ust couldn't sympathize with their pain or sorrow; which for me was, fortunately, was a good thing. This definitely wasn't the aim of the animators, but the stiffness of the humans to me made the creatures (the main characters) much more life like, even though they are actually rendered unrealistically (the animals are all caricatures are of their real-life counterparts, which lends itself to the humour of the film), their characters and personalities shine through.
In short: fun film, go see, laugh.