Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Have you noticed a tendency for buddy movies to turn into coming-of-age movies for parents-to-be? There seems to be a growing trend in Hollywood to appeal to parents, as the movie stars get older and become parents, and as CG movies have become all-pervasive and reaching for the broadest audience possible. Or is that really all? Actually, I have another hypothesis.

I think that there’s an emotional quotient to infants. Put them on America’s Funniest Video’s and we laugh. Put them in a movie and we say, “Aww.” It’s a heartstring that’s very, very easy to tug. Naturally, this provides a great fall-back for studios if they have a franchise and they can’t think of where else to go with it.

There’s another marketing trick at work here. In the spirit of the latest round of cheap tactics to keep people in theatres in the age of home theaters, HDTV and internet distribution, this third installment is presented in 3-D. The immediate benefit of 3-D is lost on me, folks, because I have poor depth perception. But even if I strain my eyes enough to see the effect, it’s marginal at best and certainly no better than a simple application of good cinematography. Granted, all the cinematography is digitally created in a CG movie, but there does exist the ability to manipulate depth of field to make subjects pop out at you. Creative cinematography is an art. 3-D is at best a gimmick and at worst an obtrusive apparatus—otherwise colorful frames are fuzzy and green even with the latest technology.

But would the intended audience of kids and parents find this an entertaining film? It’s not customarily my approach to analyze a film in this fashion. However, films like this don’t inspire dissections of scene composition or character development. It’s purely entertainment. I’m not condoning junk food so much as setting a stage for what a film like this does leave one to ably discuss. The first fifteen or twenty minutes feel aimless. When the story does get underway, the incident that sets it into motion seems thrown in—precisely what you’d expect for the third installment in a series that was already tired by the second.

In his continuing effort to gain acceptance as a responsible adult, Sid (John Leguizamo) adopts a trio of large eggs he finds, oddly, in an ice cave. The mother, a dinosaur, is not far behind. Stephen Jay Gould would be rolling in his grave. But the explanation for the latent emergence of dinosaurs is that they inhabit an underground paradise, tamed (sort of) by an adventure-seeking weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg). Ok, so there’s an underground paradise. I’ll go with it. But for the majority of the film the time is spent moving from one place to another without even so much as a Busby Berkeley number (see my review for Ice Age: The Meltdown) to break up the routine.

Somewhere in this I almost forgot to mention that Manny (Ray Romano) the woolly mammoth and his new mate Ellie (Queen Latifah) are expecting a baby. This is, of course, not really central to the plot but the tacked-on “aww” factor—note the completely absurd sequence in which Sid’s dino-kids flock to a playground Manny built (With what, exactly?) and senselessly destroy it. This is meant to show us what we already know—Sid’s failure to mature and be responsible. Mostly, I think it’s thrown in to enthrall children with some kind of destructive action whilst unintentionally encouraging those of us without children to keep it that way.

There are hip references to pop culture thrown in, including Buck’s paranoid conversation with a rock doubling as a yet-to-be-invented cell phone, as well as the central characters’ sliding off a brontosaurus’ neck, exclaiming, “Yabba Dabba Doo!” I’m not quite sure why since most parents with toddlers today are younger than me and might have no recollection of the Flintstones, and their children most definitely will not. These are merely examples of what has come to annoy me most about today’s animated films. They’re engineered and marketed to appeal to the broadest audience possible, and a good story is merely an afterthought—if at all. In 2006, Roger Ebert applauded Curious George for being genuinely aimed at young children without attempting to keep the parents occupied on another level. I’m beginning to see his point. Children shouldn’t be brainwashed with staples of the mundane adult existence. They should be allowed to have a childhood. Parents, on the other hand, have accepted the responsibility of being parents. If they cannot have the patience to take interest in the things that delight their children, then perhaps they don’t have the time or the capacity to be parents.

It would be pointless to delve further into the plot of the film. We know the story. At some point the trio break up, confront some personal demons on their journey’s way, and eventually reunite just in time for them to acquire self-confidence they thought they lacked, but was present the entire time… This is all beginning to sound oddly familiar. Diego, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 • Running Time: 94 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG for some mild rude humor and peril. • Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Animation