Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

 

Many reviewers have not been so kind to “Ice Age 3” otherwise known as “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”. I enjoyed it, even though I can concede that they have some good points. It is, after all, pretty much a retread of the earlier ones, but then it’s essentially, animation or not, a sit-com. And sit-coms do tend to be pretty much the same characters doing remarkably similar things in every episode.  I didn’t really expect it to break new ground in terms of the script writing. I just wanted my favourite characters, most particularly Sid the Sloth, voiced by Jon Lequizamo, to be true to their form.

What I will advise people though is that they will enjoy “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” much more if they go to see it in 3D. Generally I am ambivalent about 3D in movies, finding that there’s something about the fairground attraction element of it that tends to detract from involvement in the story. With this film, it is the single best reason to see it. Visually, it’s one of the most engaging 3D movies I’ve seen. There were many moments in which I wanted the action to freeze, so I could examine the scene in more detail.

That meant that I was concentrating on the visuals when many of the people around me were laughing at the jokes, and gags, but the jokes and gags were fine too. I think many going to see it will have their own characters. For me it’s Sid and Scrat (still voiced by the director of the first Ice Age film and the producer of this one, Chris Wedge). I have never found Manny (Ray Romano), or his lady mammoth friend Ellie (Queen Latifah) particularly engaging. Nor, after the first movie where he was something of a threat, did I find Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Dennis Leary) particularly interesting.

In this third episode Manny is waiting for Ellie to have their child. Diego seems to be slowing down a bit, maybe because of age, or maybe he’s becoming too much of a pack animal. Sid is beginning to feel that the unlikely herd (which also includes possums Eddie (Josh Peck) and Crash (Seann William Scott), won’t be same once Manny has his own family to look after, so he sets off to find a family of his own.

What he finds is three dinosaur eggs, which he decided to nurture until they are hatched. As he’s the first thing they see when they are born, they decide that he must be their mother. It’s an imprinting that’s made all the more tentative by the fact that they also seem to think he, and some of his other animal friends, actually taste good.

Of course the real mother turns up from her own land, an underground lost world where these supposedly extinct creatures are alive and well – to get her kids back. In the process she takes Sid back with her.

Manny, Ellie, Diego and the two possum “brothers” follow her into the lost world to rescue their friend. To retrieve him, the group has to ravel through areas with names like the Chasm of Death and Plates of Woe. The lost underground world gives the 3D animators a chance to ring the changes from the rest of the series. Now they can deal with a dense tropical climate and a jungle environment that owes much to “”The Lost World,” “King Kong” and “The Land Before Time.”

In this land, for which they are woefully unprepared, they meet a new character who seems to have wandered in from “Pirates of the Caribbean.” He’s Buck, a swashbuckling weasel, voiced as if channeling Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow, by British actor Simon Pegg.

Buck’s been here a long time, and even has a touch of the obsessiveness of Captain Ahab about him. He’s long been locked in battle with a giant dinosaur called Rudy. Buck is frankly a bit nuts.

Still, as they all travel through this new and threatening land, director Carlos Saldanha has the chance to make the most of the 3D animation. As with the first two movies, height is often used as a threat. Here the characters seem to frequently find themselves hanging over bubbling lava lakes, or heading to the edge of a lava waterfall. A flight scene on the back of pterodactyl like creatures, provides an opportunity for particularly dazzling swooping and flying effects as they pass through narrow ravines and swirl in the air, all in 3D.

As so often with recent animated movies, the main theme of the story is family, even if it’s a family of choice rather than a family of birth. But it isn’t worth thinking too deeply about the attempts to be warmhearted. Scrat the squirrel is of course here again, searching for his beloved acorn, but this time he’s facing competition and a love interest in the form of a lady squirrel.

But above everything else, my recommendation is that you see this one for the visuals. Computer animation is developing so fact that even between episodes one and two of the Ice Age saga you could see a new sophistication in the imagery. Even when Shrek 2 came out people were saying it was a major step forward from the first Shrek because his the characters’ skin had texture.

Gradually computers have got better at rendering scales, fur, bark and hair. Manny in Ice Age 3 has – unsurprisingly for a woolly mammoth – hair going in every direction. And each hair is rendered in 3D. When a snow flake falls in this movie, you can be amazed at the fact that it’s a fully rounded snow flake. “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” takes no short cuts in getting the maximum effect into every shot.

On the other hand it works well because they don’t go for the cheap effects, poking three dimensional objects into the auditorium every few minutes. Here there 3D just draws you into the scene. You would like to enter it to walk around. This movie didn’t claim to be anything more than an entertainment, but it’s one of the first movies I’ve seen that gave me a sense that someone could find a way to use 3D movie making in a film with more serious artistic intent. So yes, script wise and character wise it is more of the same. If that’s what you are looking for or expecting , with more stunning visuals than ever, you’ll be happy. I was.