Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) – on HD. There’s normally only one reason you watch films in the Ice Age series: and it’s for a certain lovable sabertooth squirrel named Scrat who obsesses over his acorn. Everything else in the series’ films are really just distractions that you have to get through before the next scene with Scrat shows up.

The third and most recent film in the series – Dawn of the Dinosaurs or commonly known as Ice Age 3 – was panned by one of the two film reviewers I follow. As a result, I gave the film’s theatrical run a miss opting to see it only on rental later. The rental DVD arrived on Thursday evening, and surprisingly the film wasn’t that bad even after discounting Scrat’s scenes.

Ice Age 3 sees the return of the roster of main characters which was about doubled after the first film in 2002. Of the original trio, there was Manny the mammoth, Diego a sabertooth tiger, and Sid the perpetually confused and clumsy sloth. The second film introduced Manny’s fellow mammoth and eventual love-interest Ellie, and two opossums Eddie and Crash who specialize in playing dead.

I didn’t enjoy the additions of Ellie – who was written as a whiny and temperamental mammoth – nor Eddie and Crash, whose antics came across more as pointless filler just to pad the second film’s run length. But the third film seems to have benefited from better character writing: Ellie’s now pregnant, and she demonstrates better sensibility (presumably because she’s now a mother to be) and serves as a nice foil to the usual madcap routines of the original trio. And Eddie and Crash now have better lines and are a hoot to watch as they play off each other, even only often to underline the seriousness of another messed-up situation they get themselves into.

The best addition to the new film though lies in (yet) another new character and named Buck (below picture), a half-blind, slightly deranged, Ben Gunn and Rambo-esque weasel that takes the role of the party’s guide in their quest to save Sid when he accidentally steals eggs from a mother T-Rex. Buck’s an exemplar of a character in animation that’s given great things to do, given crazily hilarious lines, lovingly animated, and perfectly voice-cast in this case with Simon Pegg, the recent Star Trek‘s Scotty but better regarded in his role as Sergeant Angel of Hot Fuzz. Put simply, Buck’s the most memorable animated character I’ve seen in films this year, and his scene-stealing antics supersedes even Scrat (Scrat who? LOL).

Much of the film takes place in a huge underground world that’s lush with jungle and greenery and filled with prehistoric dinosaurs that our lovable crew thought were extinct. It’s quite a nice change of visuals from the last two films which took place mostly amidst, well, ice. As for the story itself… well, don’t watch these films expecting coherence or logic. The film’s basically strings together using improbable circumstances with well-animated action scenes.

But the litmus test in these kid-friendly films is in whether you like the characters and whether you laugh at their antics. In Ice Age 3‘s case, it’s a resounding yes for both. Even Ling liked the show and remarked that it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared earlier on.