Ice Age is the Best Film this Year

What a great year, so far. I've been able to take my son to 3 films this year. He laughed hard at this one, so did I. The comedy is smart. I liked the fact that the comedy came in so many forms: visual (such as when the sloth is in a cave and sees an evolutionary history of himself frozen in the ice almost museum like), cliches, and one-liners.

In the first few scenes we meet our main characters. A loser sloth, Sid (John Leguizamo), a Mammoth, Manfred, with issues (Ray Romano), and a tiger, Diego, that has lost his soul(Denis Leary).

Basically, the tiger pack is ticked off at the humans for killing off half their pack. So, their leader, Soto(Goran Visnjic) orders a fake attack on the camp, so they can swipe one of the humans babies. Interestingly enough, this all sounds like a mob thing. Soto even talks like a God Father. And, all the tigers have Italian accents.

Diego is given the responsibility of snatching the kid. But, his mother saves him. She is mortally injured. The child is left in the care of the oddball pair of Sid and Manfred who have just met. They attempt to take the child back to the father. Diego joins this curious pack in an attempt to get the kid back to save his own neck. The only thing standing in his way appears to be Manfred the who is too smart for the likes of a sneaky tiger. In the process, the sloth finds friends, the mammoth deals with his emotional mess, and the lion learns what being in a pack means.

The side plot involves a squirrel and an acorn. It is as funny as the main story. And, it received as much attention by the audience as the main plot. It was interesting how the writer intertwined the two. But, I'm not telling you more. That would spoil it.

The voices where all picked to serve a humorous purpose. I mentioned the pack voices all being Italian. So, I don't think it's fair to say that the voice overs were good or bad. In a lot of animated movies, the characters are made to match the voices. In this case, the voices were chosen to match the characters. In this case, the credit goes to the director not the actors.

I would like to mention the length. A lot of times, it feels like the movie is too long, or too short for proper story telling. This one was just right. Didn't drag anything out, but developed everything just right. I'm rather impressed after the year in movies we just had.

I would recommend taking the whole family to this one. Everyone in the theater was in stitches from 2 to 50. And, it got the mark of approval from my 4 year old and myself.