Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Franchise Frenzy: Ice Age

Welcome to Franchise Frenzy! Every other week I post a column analyzing the quality and pop culture impact of a certain Hollywood franchise. This week, I put on a winter coat in July in order to make my way through the Ice Age franchise.

In 2002, CGI animated films were scarce, with DreamWorks only having released two of them at that point, Disney Animation doing only one and even PIXAR only having four of them under their belt at that point. Aside from the occasional Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, the landscape for CGI animated features was vacant. Enter Blue Sky Studios, whose first feature Ice Age became the cornerstone of the company. They've very rarely stepped outside of that franchise comfort zone (pity too, as aside from Rio, their other non-Ice Age movies range from diverting to endlessly charming), but if every single entry in this series was as strong as the original, I doubt any of us would complain. 

Now, the animation in Ice Age has not aged well at all. Weirdly, the humans still look OK, whereas other characters, primarily Diego, just look rigid and emotionless. However, the movie is really the only one of the series, and to be honest, the only movie from Blue Sky Studios, to actually try to inject some darker material into the proceedings. Death is an extremely common element in this story, with the young boys mother dying being the plot point that really sets Manny and Diego on their epic journey. But the best bit for me is the flashback sequence that depicts the death of Manny's wife and child. Told in the form of a cavepainting, not a word is said in the sequence, but immediately so much emotion comes across. It's kind of jarring none of the other movies tried to bring out this kind of gravitas, because man oh man does it work here.

That is actually interesting to look at in the Ice Age films as a whole; they're really jarring in tone. Only the third and fourth movies really share a similar atmosphere, while the first and second movies each have a distinct identity. The first one is a road trip movie with many humorous elements, but most of the humor is delegated to Scrat. Audiences loved Scrat, I do too, but it did lead to humor becoming much more emphasized in the sequels. This leads to mixed results; the first sequel has just enough bizarre humor to work, while the third and fourth just settle for blandness that sucks all the fun out of the proceedings.

What I find kinda funny is how the third and fourth entries are extremely kid-friendly, but the second movie, Ice Age: The Meltdown, is actually one of the more adult family movies made in recent times. I believe (emphasis on believe) this is the first CGi-animated feature to use the word crap in it, while this movie also was my introduction to the word pervert. And of course, the films main conflict arises from Ellie (the movies new female mammoth played delightfully by Queen Latifah) thinking Manny wants to sleep with her. Of course, humor isn't just more off-color material, as Ellie's belief that she is indeed a possum leading to many hilarious moments in the film. It's really the only situation in the entire franchise that matches Scrat in terms of humorous farce, which none of the movies to come can match.

Not the third one, Ice Age: Dawn of The Dinosaurs, doesn't try. The extremely episodic structure wears on one immediately, and the film settles for more bland humor after the edgier second one. However, Simon Peggs turn as Buck the Weasel (a creature whose been trapped within a world of dinosaurs for ages) almost saves the entire proceedings, as he does come as close as anything to matching the unpredictable gags found in the first movie. But this one did show that the series had finally run out of steam, considering all the characters were now as bland as ever, with Ellie sadly reduced to playing a straight man to all of the chaos in this entry after supplying tons of laughs in the second movie. Even Scrat couldn't avoid the movies relentless monotonousness, as his exploits with a female Scrat just not delivering the kind of fun the character was famous for at that point. 

In the most recent entry, Ice Age: Continental Drift, the filmmakers seemed to try to solve the problem of the boring characters in the third movie by adding in a ton of new people for this fourth movie. Tons of recognizable actors like Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, Nick Frost, Wanda Sykes, Aziz Ansari and Drake(????) were hired to play these new people, but none of them left any kind of impact, instead just adding into a mess of a film that is sorely lacking the spontaneity and pathos that made the first two movies so enjoyable. The animations improved considerably since 2002 (and will even more so when the fifth installment hits theaters in 2016) but in terms of quality, it's been an unending downward spiral for these critters.

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