Mike Thurmeier is a Blue Sky animator who rose to direct the later Ice Age films, and his gift is for the squirrel: wordless, physical, perfectly timed. Spread across a feature with a dozen talking animals, that gift keeps things moving and not much more.
Fi1m perspective
Scrat wants the acorn. Scrat gets the acorn. Then the ground opens, or the sea comes in, or a piece of the continent slides away, and he goes after it with his whole body. The squirrel has no lines and needs none, and the people who make him funny are animators rather than writers. Mike Thurmeier is one of those animators, and the best things attached to his name are the squirrel's.
He joined Blue Sky Studios as an animator and stayed until there was no Blue Sky to stay at. He was lead animator and additional story on the first Ice Age (2002), then supervising animator on Robots (2005) and Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006). His first directing credit was a Scrat short, No Time for Nuts (2006), with Chris Renaud. The features followed: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) with Carlos Saldanha, Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) with Steve Martino, Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) with Galen T. Chu. He has never had a film to himself. Every one carries a second name beside his, which is how animation studios work and also makes it hard to say which choices were his. The studio closed in 2021; he contributed story to Ice Age: Scrat Tales (2022) afterwards.
What he does well is faces and bodies: the double take, the slow dawning, the fall that lands a beat later than you expect. Continental Drift has plenty of that and we gave it 53. It is bright, fast and good-natured, Peter Dinklage's pirate ape is a real addition, and Thurmeier and Martino keep it moving, which is a skill. It is also the first three films with the furniture moved about. Somewhere in the middle of the voyage our attention drifted, and what brought it back each time was a cut to the squirrel, which told us where the film's heart was and where it was not. The reviews of Collision Course said much the same, a step back in story while the animation got better, and we have no reason to doubt them.
Thurmeier has said of the first film that "I think the look of the film is definitely dictated by the conditions in which we had to make it." That film had three animals, a baby and a walk home, and was better for having so little. The ones he directed had the money, the possums, the pirates and the grandmother, and lost the walk. Give him one animal and one acorn and he is a comedian. Give him a herd and he is a traffic warden. The short is the thing to seek out; the features are for the under-tens, and they will be perfectly happy.
Biography
Mike Thurmeier, also credited as Michael Thurmeier, is a Canadian animator and film director. He worked at Blue Sky Studios, beginning his career as an animator on projects including Fight Club (1999) before moving into supervising animator roles on Ice Age (2002), Robots (2005) and Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006).
Thurmeier made his feature directing debut as co-director of Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). He went on to direct Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012, with Steve Martino) and Ice Age: Collision Course (2016, with Galen T. Chu). He also co-directed the short film No Time for Nuts (2006), which received an Academy Award nomination.
Born in 1975 in Regina, Saskatchewan, he is best known for his contributions to the Ice Age franchise.
