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.