The fourth Ice Age is bright, short and perfectly amiable, with Peter Dinklage’s pirate ape the one addition worth the trip. Everything else is the herd doing what the herd has done three times before, a little louder and at sea.
The fourth Ice Age runs 88 minutes, has two directors, Mike Thurmeier and Steve Martino, twelve credited voices and one idea it did not have last time, which is pirates. It is bright, fast and good-natured, and it is also what the previous three films were with the furniture moved about. The verdict is easy to give. If you have children under ten you will get a quiet hour and a half; if you have not, you will get Peter Dinklage and a squirrel, and they are nearly enough.
The squirrel comes first, as he always does. Scrat chases his acorn down through the crust of the earth to the molten core, gives the planet a spin, and the single continent above him cracks and slides apart like plates on a pulled tablecloth. It is four minutes of wordless slapstick with John Powell’s orchestra doing all the talking, and we laughed out loud three times before anyone had said a word. Nothing in the next eighty minutes managed that, and we spent some of them waiting for him to come back.
The story, by Michael Berg and Lori Forte, with a screenplay by Berg and Jason Fuchs, splits the herd in two. Manny (Ray Romano), Sid (John Leguizamo), Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid’s Granny (Wanda Sykes) go to sea on an iceberg; Ellie (Queen Latifah) and the teenage Peaches (Keke Palmer) stay on land and walk. Editors James Palumbo and David Ian Salter cut between the two, and the pattern sets in early: every time we leave the water the film slows down. The land strand is a lesson about being yourself, taught to Peaches by everyone she meets, and Latifah is left with the lines that explain the lesson. Josh Gad’s Louis, a molehog who loves her and cannot say so, has the only sweet moment in it.
The sea is where the film earns its keep. Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage) is a giant ape with a baritone, good manners and a ship built out of ice, and Dinklage plays him as someone who enjoys being a villain and sees no reason to hide it. He sings his introduction, Powell turns it into a proper shanty with brass and stamping, and for a few minutes the film has a pulse. Nick Frost voices Flynn, an elephant seal who is pleased by everything, and gets the biggest laughs among the new crew. Jennifer Lopez’s Shira, a sabre-toothed first mate who catches Diego’s eye, has the voice for the part and not much of a part.
Renato Falcão is credited with cinematography, which in an animated film means deciding where the camera sits and how the light falls, and his choices are the best thing about the look. He keeps the camera low on the water, so the swell comes up over the lens and the ice floes catch a hard blue-white glare, and the storm has real weight to it. The characters themselves have not changed since 2002, and against that sea they look like what they are, soft toys with faces. The film was built for 3D, and things fly at the lens accordingly; at home, flat, you notice how many shots exist only for that reason.
Granny is the other addition, and Sykes gets the sharpest lines in the script. Some of them land. A couple are cruder than the U certificate leads you to expect, in the way American family animation often is, and the running joke about her invisible pet is paid off in a manner we will not describe. By the midpoint we were bored, and we felt slightly ashamed of it, because the cinema around us was not. Children laugh at Sid falling over, and Sid falls over a great deal.
The first Ice Age, in 2002, had three animals, a baby and a walk home, and it was better for having so little. Each film since has added bodies, and this one has possums, pirates, a grandmother and a love interest for the tiger, all competing for 88 minutes. Thurmeier and Martino keep it moving, which is a skill, and it does not outstay a child’s attention. Ours wandered earlier.
See it on a wet afternoon with someone small, and watch the first four minutes yourself. Dinklage’s ape and the squirrel’s acorn are worth the price of the rest; whether the rest is worth sitting through is for the small person to say, and they will probably say yes.
