Ice Age

Ice Age is good company for a modest evening: funny, brief and carried by characters who are more appealing than their story. Chris Wedge directs with enough confidence in physical comedy to keep a familiar animated adventure moving, though the dialogue is less sure of when to stop. The jokes work best when nobody is trying to be clever. There is enough warmth here to forgive the routine plotting, provided a family comedy is what we are after.

Ray Romano gives Manfred ‘Manny’ the weary sound of somebody who had hoped for better company. His impatience is funny because Romano allows the kindness underneath to remain audible, without softening every complaint into an invitation to like him. John Leguizamo’s Sid and Denis Leary’s Diego are distinct enough voices to keep the exchanges lively even when the writing settles for another round of bickering. We need to enjoy these characters together for the adventure to matter, and the voice performances largely do that work.

Scrat has the clearer ambition: he wants his acorn. We laughed hardest at his repeated efforts to secure it, because the persistence makes each physical setback funnier without needing a spoken explanation. The scale of his determination is absurd beside the size of the object, and the film gives that simple joke enough attention to make it hold. These interruptions also expose how hard the central trio sometimes have to talk for a smaller laugh.

Brian McEntee and Marcin Jakubowski’s production design favours firm, angular shapes that make the physical action easy to follow. That clarity helps, although the surroundings can feel uninviting. The computer animation is expressive enough to sell a joke, but the images seldom make us want to pause and look around. Scrat’s stripped-down business suits this approach better than the main adventure, where a little more visual surprise would have helped.

John Carnochan’s editing helps the set pieces by keeping their movement readable and getting on with the next problem. At 81 minutes, the film has little opportunity to exhaust its welcome, though brevity does not make every stretch equally lively. David Newman’s music is less interesting to us than the timing of the physical jokes. Its encouragement can feel unnecessary when the characters and the animation have already made the intended feeling clear.

The screenplay by Michael J. Wilson, Michael Berg and Peter Ackerman is less assured when it asks for tenderness. The sentiment is not objectionable, and Manny is a sturdy enough character to carry it, but the film sometimes presses for affection that the voice performances have already earned. The glib exchanges cause a similar problem: an amusing relationship gets treated as an obligation to keep delivering lines. Neither habit ruins the comedy, but both make parts of it feel more manufactured than they need to.

Family animation can become exhausting when every exchange has to entertain two audiences at once. Ice Age occasionally falls into that habit, but its clearest physical jokes need no such calculation. Children do not have to wait for an adult to explain why an acorn has caused so much difficulty. Choose it for an undemanding family evening, rather than an evening when the adults expect to be surprised.