Ice Age arrived in theaters on March 15, 2002, and it made money — $383 million worldwide, the highest-grossing animated film of that year and the eighth highest-grossing film of 2002 overall. 20th Century Fox Animation and Blue Sky Studios had a hit. What they did not have was a movie that holds up. Ice Age is 81 minutes of competent computer animation wrapped around a script that never decides what it wants to be.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers.
Manny, Sid, and Diego Walk South
The premise is sturdy enough. A herd of prehistoric animals migrates south ahead of the coming ice age. Sid, a clumsy ground sloth abandoned by his family, gets grudgingly rescued by Manfred “Manny,” a surly woolly mammoth who did not migrate with the others. Sid talks. Manny wants silence. Then they find a human baby, Roshan, and his injured mother in the river below a waterfall. She leaves the infant with them and is washed away.
Diego, a saber-toothed tiger, offers to take the baby. A mistrustful Manny orders him to track the humans instead. Diego complies, but his real orders come from Soto, who wants the chief’s son dead and has threatened to kill Diego if he fails. That night, Diego secretly sends word that he is bringing both the baby and a mammoth for the pack to eat.
Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, and Denis Leary voice the three leads. Leguizamo does the heavy lifting; the movie leans on Sid’s mouth and gets what it pays for.
The Cast and the Release Schedule
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 15, 2002 | U.S. theatrical release |
| 2002 | $383 million worldwide gross |
Three things sink Ice Age, ranked by how much they matter:
- The comedy. Fox Animation originally conceived this as a traditionally animated action-adventure drama. Writers Michael Berg, Michael J. Wilson, and Peter Ackerman were brought on to lighten it. The result is a tone that lurches.
- The animation. Blue Sky had just converted from a visual effects house into a computer animation studio. It shows. The fur and ice look like a proof of concept.
- The sentiment. Manny’s flashback to his family, killed by humans, is the one scene with weight. It arrives late and gets buried under slapstick.
What the Ice Cave Gets Right
The cave paintings sequence is the film’s best idea. The trio travels through an ice cave and finds human art on the walls. By then Manny has become deeply attached to Roshan. Diego’s turn — he switches sides after Manny saves him from a lava flow — is thinner but functional.
David Newman composed and conducted the score.
Where the Score Lands
Ice Age is not a bad movie. The migration setup, the waterfall, the pack waiting for Diego — the pieces are there. The nerve is not.
The $383 million is a fact about the box office, not about who bought a ticket. The Metacritic score of 47/100 is a fact about critics. Both can be true at once.
Our verdict, and it is ours: this is a debut that proved Blue Sky could finish a feature, not one that proved it knew what to do with one.
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