Movie review: Ice Age

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Now there's something you don't see every day - a computer-animated film featuring a giant furry creature, his annoying sidekick and a cute little human. Actually this is quite different from Monsters Inc - the fur's not blue but woolly mammoth brown, and the sidekick is a sibilant sloth named Sid.

The prehistoric setting might make the film appear to be the sequel to Disney's dreary Dinosaur, but no, the good thing about the Fox production Ice Age is - as spectacular as its state of the art visuals are - this one still knows it's a cartoon.

Late animator Chuck Jones gets a homage here, whether it's Scrat, a toothy accident-prone little rodent who might well be Wile E. Coyote from a former life, or Sid, whose motormouthed lisp owes something to Sylvester the Cat.

Scrat is but a hilarious sideshow to the real story. That's about the harebrained Sid, the stolid Manny the Mammoth and devious sabre-toothed tiger Diego who, as the snow starts coming in, find themselves on a mission to return an abandoned human infant to his migratory tribe.

So it becomes a bit of a road movie, a bit Three Mammals and a Cave Baby, and quite dazzling as it does more slapstick on ice in a couple of sequences than an entire Winter Olympics.

The story, though predictable, is delivered in often inventive ways (Manny's lonely existence is explained with animated cave drawings) and the script is as heavy on sly pop-culture quips to appeal to 21st-century Homo Sapiens as it is sight gags aimed at your inner Cro-Magnon.

And with the voice performances - especially those of Leguizamo as Sid and Leary as Diego - and their fur-perfect renderings giving the creatures real character and physicality, Ice Age brings great warmth to what could be a chilly digital world .

It might not be up there with the Shreks of the era, but it's still an upstanding part of the CGI evolution.

Suffice to say, it's well worth the price of an adult ticket, too.

Cast: The voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Jack Black

Director: Chris Wedge

Rating: G

Running time: 85 mins

Screening: Village, Hoyts