Ice Age 2002
I saw this with a bunch of kids. It was fun to hear during some kind of dirty diaper joke or something like that because all these young voices would be laughing. But even though there were just as many adults in the theater, you didn’t hear them laughing much. Maybe a chuckle every now and then.
The humor wasn’t real complex and the story was fairly simple. There was some decent character development with the sloth, mastodon, and tiger. Except for the mastodon, the characters are all cut-outs. You’ve seen them before. There is some real depth to the mastodon, but for the most part he is the standard grump. Kind of similar to Shrek. And also sharing some of the darkness of Shrek which I can mention in a spoiler later on.
I also didn’t like the very manipulative tugs at the emotions. This was done very clumsily and without much in the way of any kind of moral theme. In that way it reminds me of The Lion King.
Children’s films are fun because you can generally make simple points that you can’t get away with with real actors. But I still think there has to be some kind of framework and it wasn’t handled well here.
Still, it’s kind of fun and if you have kids to take they will probably enjoy it and you shouldn’t be too bored. I’ll give it a C.
Owned on: Digital