Ice Age Continental Drift movie latest video

Ice Age: Continental Drift isn’t a bad movie. In fact, it’s better than I expected. The animation is vibrant and just the right level of detailed. Directors Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier have a way with angles, always choosing just the right perspectives to make the pictures pop and the action frenzied. A hurried sense of danger runs like an undercurrent through the film, and the plot works fairly well as an adventure story. Unfortunately, what Continental Drift lacks, apart from a single wow moment, are laughs and moments of joy.

Ice Age: Continental Drift movie images

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Ice Age: Continental Drift movie cast and crew

Directed by

Steve Martino

Mike Thurmeier  

Aziz Ansari

Joy Behar         

Christopher Campbell       

Alain Chabat

Ester Dean

Peter Dinklage

Aubrey Graham

Jason Fricchione

Nick Frost

Josh Gad         

Ben Gleib        

George Jacobs

Queen Latifah

Ice Age: Continental Drift movie overview

Whatever else can be said about the Ice Age films, they are certainly cost-efficient. The first instalment in this animated series congealed in the spring of 2002, followed by further glaciations in 2006, 2009 and now 2012 — although with a voice cast made up of such odd bods as John Leguizamo and Denis Leary, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that 20th Century Fox barely expected the franchise to last one film, let alone four.

But with strong followings in South America and Europe, the series has accrued more lucre worldwide than Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy, and so here it is grinding back into motion for the holidays with a kind of tectonic inevitability.

Ice Age: Continental Drift, the thinnest in the set, has been on general release in Scotland and Northern Ireland for two weeks and has been playing previews in English and Welsh cinemas for the past two weekends, which means it has already grossed more than £7 million before its official release. Once again, the story revolves around Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (Leguizamo) and Diego the smilodon (Leary), who are separated from their multi-species herd thanks to the shifting of the Earth’s land masses.

This is a novel premise, and more in step with the fossil record than Ice Age 3’s “lost valley of the dinosaurs” plot, which Sid remembers as “very unlikely but lots of fun” in some droll opening banter. However, it leads to nothing more than a very ordinary pirate story, as the animals’ floating land fragment is hijacked by a gang of buccaneers who live on a large iceberg shaped a bit like a galleon. They include Shira, a sabre-toothed cat voiced by Jennifer Lopez and grandly described in the film’s production notes as “an empowered woman”.

Pause for a moment and savour the flagrant laziness of all this: rather than explore the unique storytelling possibilities that Ice Age’s unusual setting allows, the writers have just taken a shopworn scenario for children’s stories and made it colder. (There’s no point comparing this to the recent Aardman film The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, which crammed more imagination and surprises than are contained in this film into a single backdrop.)

Now consider that while Manny, Sid and Diego are tangling with the pirates, the rest of Ice Age’s cast must be given something to do. This turns out to be a methodical retreat from the shifting land masses, which move at around two miles per hour: a fair old clip in geological terms, maybe, but cinematically one that is unlikely to set pulses racing. This plot strand also features a wan peer-pressure fable involving teenage mammoths, one of whom is voiced by pop star Nicki Minaj. The behind-the-scenes footage played over the end credits suggests Minaj did not remove her sunglasses in the voiceover booth, and somehow you can hear those sunglasses in every line.

As with the earlier Ice Age films, it’s the least relevant parts of the film that prove most entertaining: the notionally throwaway interludes featuring Scrat, a jittery squirrel in perpetual pursuit of an acorn. The Scrat skits are vaultingly imaginative (the first offers a wry explanation for the geological rumblings that set the film in motion), they crackle with Chuck Jones-ish anarchy and are shot in a deadpan style quite unlike the wheeling 3D visuals elsewhere.

Aside from a few Pixar shorts, they are the most successful attempt in mainstream contemporary animation to reproduce the kinetic hysteria of the old Looney Tunes shorts, which makes it all the more puzzling that Blue Sky Studios continues to treat them as a sideshow. Would 90 minutes of Scrat centre stage be too much in the inevitable Ice Age 5? Perhaps, but better that than more of this.

Ice Age: Continental Drift movie overview

Ice Age: Continental Drift isn’t a bad movie. In fact, it’s better than I expected. The animation is vibrant and just the right level of detailed. Directors Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier have a way with angles, always choosing just the right perspectives to make the pictures pop and the action frenzied. A hurried sense of danger runs like an undercurrent through the film, and the plot works fairly well as an adventure story. Unfortunately, what Continental Drift lacks, apart from a single wow moment, are laughs and moments of joy. 

The Ice Age series has always worked best when it balances good one-liners and zany shenanigans with chaotic excitement. Continental Drift makes the occasional joke, but none of the humor feels particularly fresh or memorable. As a result, the tone is a bit off. Too many quips are mailed in, and too much dialogue is earmarked for proving a moral lesson or advancing the story arc. That’s not to say the premise doesn’t work. It does. It’s just absent that likeable quality that made fans want to return to the first installment. If the goal was to create a watchable hour-and-a-half of material, Continental Drift is clearly a success, but if the goal was to create a product anyone older than ten would want to watch again, the film has to be considered a disappointment. 

The story begins with our old friend Scrat, who, not surprisingly, is hunting for acorns. Due mostly to incompetence, his misadventure winds up taking him to the Earth’s core where all his shuffling sets off a series of earthquakes that rip Pangaea into the continents we know today. Manny (Ray Romano), Sid (John Leguizamo) and Diego (Denis Leary) all wind up on a floating iceberg, while their family and friends seek shelter on one of the continents. Promises to see each other again are shouted as the makeshift raft drifts into the unknown, and our heroes set off to meet new characters and engineer schemes to get back home. 

The ocean is a new playground for the Ice Age animators, and in pirate ships, abandoned islands and ferocious animals, Continental Drift finds inspiration. It’s during this stretch the film overtly works. We’re introduced to the deadly Captain Gutt (wonderfully voiced by Peter Dinklage) and his band of goofy pirates. One-by-one, he saved each of their lives. In return, they swore their allegiances, and now, he’d like to add Manny, Sid and Diego to his crew. They refuse and destroy his ship in the process, turning from potential friends to hated, bumbling foes in an instant. Eventually, our three heroes’ quest to find land and Gutt’s promise for vengeance intersect, creating a somewhat interesting third act that’s arguably worth the price of admission. 

Coming up with a reason for a sequel is always difficult. Making a fourth installment seem worthwhile is borderline impossible. Oddly, Continental Drift actually accomplishes that task. Once Manny and company are set adrift, it’s obvious there’s enough action and adventure to warrant a new film. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t follow through with the easy part and write enough jokes to make the experience fun. Since the adventure isn’t quite adventurous enough on its own, there’s just not enough here to call Continental Drift a good movie. It’s just passable, which might be worth it to hardcore fans but won’t be enough to satisfy the rest of us. 

There’s already been talk of a fifth installment. Given how well the film is performing, I think it’s likely we will get another Ice Age movie. After watching Continental Drift, I’m not opposed to that idea. I just hope to Scrat everyone involved makes a concerted effort to have a little more fun while making it. Theatergoers need reasons to smile and jokes to laugh at. An animated movie has to be more than pretty exciting, and this one just isn’t.