Where do I begin with this Movie, my first in a series of, what I hope are, pupil-dilating reviews. I’ll start with a picture, that should set the scene. Here we go:
Ok...*deep sigh*...this picture captures exactly what Ice Age 3 is: a giant, hungry, flesh-eating dinosaur. I think Sid the Sloth (Ice Age 3's only genuine anthropomorphic character: feeble, clingy, loves parenting but is unequivocally shit at it) aptly captures what this big, money-hungry, CGI dinosaur of a Film is doing: it is gobbling up children, shrinking adults into children faster than one of Harry Potter's reducio spells, and, quite blatantly, pissing film cliche and story motif into our innocent/world-weary (delete as appropriate) faces.
I know what you're probably thinking this Summer's Day, hand on chin as you crawl through this stinky, prehistoric bowel with me: "it's just a kid's movie, why, err, it's a film made for the Kiddies-ya fuck!" It's for this very reason that a third Ice Age Movie should have health and education ministers all over the country, with shrinks and counsellors and giant, blacked-out-window vans patrolling around cinemas, abducting the children before it's too late: Ice Age 3 is CGI's new Peter Pan, and CGI is our Youth's Pied Piper.
err...right. Just for the record, I'm not insinuating that CGI films make children hop and scotch out of the cinema, following some blind ethereal source into an abandoned forest-cum-CGI film studio. I'm underscoring the value of 'Kid's films' in providing a dose of general knowledge, the impetus for encouraging imagination in a creative way, and a sense of human culture. Today it feels like perhaps 80% of movies are CGI based, and follow the theme of instructing children about basic Binomial Nomenclature: "oaarghh, ANTZ, BEEZ, TOYZ, BUGZ, EXTINCT ANIMALZ" and, ofcourse, "DINOSAURZ!".
So, Ice Age 3 is CGI's latest trip to Neverland, rolling past MJ's decaying nose and stopping time -as well as Neurogenesis- once more. Let me take you through the movie in the guise of a child's spluttering rendition to classmates in a school yard (...for the sake of this article, the child is public schooled and has a basic grasp of the english language).
Errr...the film is about, there's a Wooly Elephant, a Tiger with tusks, a stupid Squirrel, a littler Squirrel, a Hard Vark, an underground squirrel, a squirrel that builds dams and... a Gaysloth.
...Yeah...*giggle*...the start they are playing around like friends. They play in the snow and all get upset at each other because they are bored and do nothing and the girl Elephant is having a baby. Then a Dinosaur egg opens and the stupid squirrel goes under the surface of the ice and finds the Dino land. The friends chase the stupid squirrel, meet an English squirrel who shows them through Dino Land and cross boulders and lava and pearlyious quests. They go back to Ice Age at the end and feel less bored for they should of dyed in Dino land. My dad said Gaysloth was funny to my Mum- they wouldn't tell me what it is.
Just so you know, I didn't make a child write this, it was me pretending to be a modern-day kid who had viddy'd that film high on ritalin, alien waves from his Dad's iPhone and Sunny Delight or any other sugary drink that prevents the human eye from blinking. I personally thought the film was full of squirrels; I'm no Bill Oddy, but there were just so many little scrawny animals, hearts beating at 1000bpms, tails thwacking in 3D, chasing each other around like Darwin on ecstasy. I had the frequently reoccurring fear that my eyes would begin to spasm and I would stumble into epilepsy. Perhaps Children's eyes have evolved to track images at a faster rate and the film appeared to move according to their mind's eye- a mind fueled by a lunchbox-turned-medicine-cabinet of synthetic stimulants. Perhaps their eyes rotate like the ball of a computer mouse.
The action and character interaction were reminiscent of how I imagine the inside of the Scatman's head looks like, but this could have been excused if the characters had been given an original reason to propel around the screen like calor gas. Unfortunately, there was simply no reason.
The first twenty-five minutes of the film revolve around the two squirrel-things chasing each other to catch an acorn. I have not watched Ice Age 1 or 2, but I assume this is a recurring theme which acts as an official signal for Adults to begin napping as they occur, like interludes, throughout the film. I did look to the aisles occasionally, looking for an instruction manual for how to behave as an adult experiencing this movie. When the squirrels are not chasing each other, the other characters are literally standing around in the snow, apparently recovering from dragging out piss-thin storylines for two movies in-a-row. They take this time to reminisce about each others short-comings and generally pick holes out of their anthropomorphic characteristics.
The only theme running in the movie which anyone could possibly relate to, is surely an antithetical motive for children as it concerns having children. Parenting. The main protagonists, the wooly mammoths are due to have a baby, and this is the factor that propels the movie. I know Barbie Dolls and prams encourage parenting, but a film about the Ice Age should be about the Ice Age: the mammoths should be focusing on hunting and surviving in the icy tundra with the adult humour focused around their inevitable extinction due to some underlying stupidity. Ice Age 3 didn't opt for this. Instead it creates ice sculpted playgrounds and for the adults, the reminder that parenting isolates you from your friends and creates a ridiculous, nagging, anxiety in the male akin to Hugh Grant's 9 months.
The story finally starts though, with a tremendous turn in imaginative writing, when the gay sloth, stupidly feeling abandoned and deserted by his friends, finds a dinosaur egg in the Ice Age. Again, running along the theme of parenting, the dinosaurs hatch and follow Daddy Sloth around. This all spirals out of control and leads to our characters falling under the ice and into a prehistoric land. This is historically ridiculous and may vegetate children further into believing we have a world existing simultaneously beneath us and not, infact, a great fucking-hot mantle and core of molten magma. I know this is a fairy tale movie and you can make stuff up when you write these things so, again, I might be able to overlook how we addle our children's perception of evolution and extinction if there were some conviction in this movie that actually made you think a third film was created with some original ideas- not simply to cash in on a reused, tired and wrinkled condom of a CGI plotline.
Yes, it's the QUEST that ditches the film of its final hope for any integrity as a story, sinking it below the usual critique of 'just another animal CGI film' into the realms of 'just another, another animal CGI film based on a CGI film that was just another animal CGI film'. It sounds like i'm repeating myself because that is exactly what this film is. I think the directors could have taken Ice Age 1, blended the digi film reel like a Mango, drank it and shitted out the contents onto a glass table for the viewers to watch, like Ice Age sycophants under the glass with popcorn and revels. Seriously, I don't know if a child would know the difference if the clips really were all mashed up from the first movie in order to make the third. Are we really assuming our children want to watch a third film about the same thing, with the only precipitating conclusion being 'THIIIS ONE HAAAD DINOOOSAURZ'. We're insulting their intelligence and giving them no challenge whatsoever in Cinema.
The story QUEST in this film makes ET look like Shakespeare's Othello. We had films like the Goonies and Watership Down, and today kids have a story revolving around a quest, which is as old as a Dragon's menopause (check with Harry Potter, but I think it's really old!). Basically, our Ice Age friends meet another squirrel-like creature while searching for the Sloth and Dinopups (who've been kidnapped by -guess who- Mummy Dinosaur. This squirrel-like-creature is voiced by Simon Pegg donning a Captain Jack Sparrow impression which is almost, almost, genuinely funny at times (you imagine they allow Pegg to ad-lib his fanboy lips on occasion). Pegg basically outlines the route to saving their 'Gaysloth' friend via a series of events i'm terming the QUEST.
The QUEST includes such film time extenders as 'The Chasm of Doom', 'The Bridge of Bones' and any other dramatic, action cliche you can conjure up in a boardroom with lots of fat people and a board marker in ten minutes. Why do I think this QUEST montage is so bad? It's sloppy, lackluster writing in a film where there is no film to begin with. So ultimately there is absolutely no substance or justification for the movie to be different, interesting or captivating in an original way. You get the feeling the Fox fat cats are clicking their fingers at real-life living 'animalz' who have been crudely, digitally created by a programmer to enact autonomous acting in CGI films. Like they've built Ellie the-Great-Queen-Latifah-Impersonating Mammoth and asked her to just 'fuck around' on the computer studio for a bit while they press record on their big computer. I can see the sly Fox laughing at how easy this is.
There's also a sense in these CGI movies that it's not for Children atall. It's the whole 'Simpson's syndrome' of creating animation with sly, adult undertones throughout to remind adults in the movie that the filmmakers know adults are indeed at the Cinema. I can understand the asides for adults, but CGI movies are too often tight-rope walking the lines on adult and childlike themes; the result, a movie that feels like it's taking the piss out of children's intellect throughout. This is because the childlike elements are really dumbed down and the adult elements tend to be a little bit too dirty for adults to explain to children. For this reason, a film like Ice Age 3 suspends the adult and child in two completely different movies which do not achieve the potential of good CGI cinema.
The answer lies in finding the middle ground- something Ice Age 1 surely didn't do and 2 & 3 gave the big finger- adorning the movie with bright colours and ANIMALZ in a CGI franchising spell that is making burgers out of child-Shaped cash cows. Films like Wall-E and Ratatouille offer the beacon of light for CGI, firmly finding that sacred middle ground. These films do not ask children to be addicted to sugar, bright lights and repetitive slapstick humor, they challenge their knowledge of film and provide interest by being enigmatic for Kids: their not serving up directionless, schoolyard humour every other minute in order to hold a child's attention, they are opening ideas and showing them films can be genuinely captivating by not blowing a bell and whistle with special effects, goofy noises and repetitive cliche, but by being different and original in some way. For adults, CGI films such as Wall-E play out more like something from 2001 Space Odyssey: it's a genuinely worthwhile piece of CGI cinema with a storyline that is told almost entirely in silence. This skill of conveying and telling an original story to a child and an adult, makes an excellent reason for producing eye-catching CGI movies. The rest just makes me Eyerate.
I remember the first time I watched The Witches starring Angelica Houston. I must have been 5 or 6 at the time, the perfect age to watch a film like Ice Age 3. I remember how the plotline of The Witches felt dark, and scary in some ways, and that there were some elements I didn't quite understand. I remember being intrigued and captivated to watch the film several times for the simple reason that I wanted to try and take in more elements of the film as I grew up- it was interesting to see a film that contained elements in it which I now realize are quite adult and present in horror movies. For example, the Witch trying to offer Luke the chocolate bar which turns into a snake is quite a dark theme, ringing with adults and children because of child abduction fears and lessons we give children every day. Films can feed culture to children and should try to expand their horizons. I feel The Witches had elements of this, I fail to see anything of substance in the great diarrhea of CGI ANIMALZ movies.
There's also a poignant sense of nostalgia created in real-life films children watch that may never be captured in CGI. Real films actually belong in a time and a place and have actors you remember and see while growing up. I remember the setting in England for the Witches and feel slightly nostalgic. I think of Ice Age 3 and feel slightly sick. CGI could rob many children of interest in our culture and instead render them primarily interested in the actual effects and graphics which sit in the electronic box. With the heavy wealth of gadgets and gizmos out there, I am instilled with more fear when I realize films may just become a technical process, abandoning the art and story for 3d Special effects, interactive 'choose the ending' movies, augmented reality and highly paid, ugly as sin, 'voice demons'.
Ice Age 3, the beginning of the extinction of CGI? Let's hope snow.
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