Well, the key of a movie, in my point of view, is animations; since it is truly the unique asset of movies. Of course, I love the texture and "3Dness" of the characters, with fluid movements.

Of course, its music is not anywhere near remarkable. Yet, this is the only thing it hasn't got.

It has an action-packed, adventurous plot which contains plenty of humour.

It is not particularly colourful, but the colours are still decent.

FUNNY! I love the scene where they\'re slidng down the ice. And the sqirrel always cracks me up! Set during... well...the ice age and before wooly mammoths became extinct. Saber-tooths try to get revenge on a tribe of hunter-gatherers by kidnapping the chief's infant son. The mother takes the kid and runs off while the tribes men are holding the saber-teeths(?) off. Cornered by Diego, one of the sabers, she jumps into the icy water and swims or something to safety. There Sid & Manny find her and the kid....\r\nWatch the movie!

Ice Age was a nice respite from the usual brand of Pixar 3D animations. Don't get me wrong, I love Pixar, but it was nice to see the way they do things in a different group for a change. It has its own style, even its own way of telling a story.

The great thing about Ice Age is the characters. They're about as well developed as prehistoric animals can be, but their real quality is in their personalities. Each character is unique and identifiable in the way the characters from the 90's Disney movies were (I'm thinking of Lion King). Also, their design is brilliant, and perfect for their personalities. Scrat is of course a hilarious addition to the story, but the rest of the cast is great too.

I do agree that the humans were not so well designed. They seemed too blocky and solid, somehow, an appearance that didn't help much during parts of the movie that were supposed to be sad or touching. Also, the animation in general was just a little sub-par...that is to say, sometimes the way the characters moved didn't seem fluid enough to my eyes.

Regardless, Ice Age is an example of a good idea that was pulled together and done well. It's not a personal favorite but I'll gladly watch it if it's playing.

A very enjoyable movie, it wasn't quite what I had expected though. Since most of the trailers I'd seen featured only the squirrel, I thought that he would be one of the main characters. I was kind of disapointed to see that he was only side plot, but the movie still turned out to be great.

The animations isn't quite as smooth as in a Pixar movie, but everything looked really great. Only qualms I have with it were the humans looked too clayish and the way they walked was a little too stiff. Otherwise all the animals had a great texture, and, for the most part, moved very smoothly.

The soundtrack was pretty good too. It ranges from the silly chase themes to the more serious themes where Manty is looking at the pictographs, and when the dad of Pinky is looking for him. The voice work is great too. They chose a great cast, and all were great for the roles they filled.

The story, although it's been done before and maybe not in that particular way, was pretty good. It had a good moral to it and moved fairly fast. There were a couple slow spots, but they didn't last too long.

Overall this is a very enjoyable movie and in my opinion a little better than Monster's Inc.

it was hilarious. i do agree that diego was just ok, but not stellar. the squirrel is my favorite part. whenever i see that movie, i always, always watch the squirrel. manfred was pretty funny and so was sid. it was a lot like monsters inc., but hey, don't a lot of animals find humans? both homeward bound films, old yeller, and the long journey are all examples of animals finding humans. the list goes on, but hey, i don't have that much time. all in all, this movie was great, but it could have been better.

In Australia 'Ice Age' came out head-to-head with 'Monsters Inc', which seemed a one-sided contest - but 'Ice Age' was massively promoted, and was a huge hit here, by contrast with the US. Personally I enjoyed it more than 'Monsters Inc', too. Maybe it just appeals to an Australian mentality or something.

It's definately a movie I _wanted_ to like. I was in favour of a new player (even if they were only doing CGI), plus it was a talking animals film, which almost automatially scores it half a point with me :) (Unless they're horrible looking CGI dinosaurs).

I agree with a lot of what Athena and Inkwolf said in their reviews. It is good, not great - but for me anyway, it was probably about as much fun as a movie could be _without_ being great. I liked Sid and Manfred. Diego was ok without being outstanding (I'll try to avoid a spoiler here, but there is a point where he behaves in a certain way, which was just handled a little unbelievably. Not that he should do what he did just the way it was handled and paced).

The Squirrel of course is a real winner: perhaps the one thing about the movie which lifts its head into the 'classic' status. Everything else about it could just have been just a little bit better. But I'm not bagging the movie. I really enjoyed it, and I'll certainly watch it again, and probably end up buying it one day.

I was hoping that this might be a warm up to something really special for newcomers Blue Sky, but it seems their next movie is some lame looking thing about uigly robots. Ah, well. A pox on robots, I say. Haven't we got them out of our system after that Speilberg disaster?

'Ice Age' gets a very solid 3 from me. 'Monsters Inc' gets a rather weaker 3. Just my personal taste, I guess.

I was looking forward to enjoying this movie when it came out in theaters. It seemed like a funny, spunky movie, which it is, in small doses. I say in small doses because the rest of it almost fatally ruins the movie. The story had almost next to no point. Instead of a survival movie, we get a movie about a bunch of misfits trying to return a kid to his parents. And true to form, the villains also want the kid. That's okay. Many movies like that work. Here it doesn't because the villains are just so bland and dimensionless. The way the main so-called villain becomes part of the main characters' group and turns from a deceitful character into an honest one is nice and rather unexpected, but then he becomes a tool to subject the audience to an underhanded and overused plot device towards the end that just doesn't seem all that real. The jokes hardly ever work. Anachronisms in a pre-historic time period? Been there. Done that. Fortunately, the funniest parts come from John Leguizamo's character, Sid and especially the irresistible saber tooth squirrel, er. . .Scrat, whose hyperactive twitchiness and never-ending battle to bury a single acorn will win you over. And the mammoth Manny is so wonderfully developed that he all but saves this movie and makes it even watchable. The animation in this movie is sufficient. Never on par with Pixar's works but also never mechanical or fake like what you see in Final Fantasy. Just enough to make the characters seem alive and expressive.

All in all, Ice Age is an entertaining romp in fits and has parts that save it from being a bad movie. However, it has more than just a little flaws to make it a good movie.

A pretty good film, with interesting characters, some funny parts, and a lot going on.

But....

It's obvious why these ice age critters are extinct. They have NOOO FEMALES!

Oh, sure, there's the human mother (who dies at the beginning.) There are a couple of female sloths for the sloth to flirt with briefly.

But there are no other women in the human tribe, no females in the sabre-tooth tiger pack, and no women pretty much in the whole film. Not so much as a token female--even the baby is a boy.

I'm not a radical feminist or anything, but...it seems awfully dim to make a movie with no females which is meant to appeal to an audience of children (or adults) of both sexes.

Apart from that, Ice Age is certainly worth a watch, and maybe even a rewatch or two.

Good, but not great. There are indeed some very funny moments in the film--many of which provided by that now famous squirrel--the animation is good, the voice acting is good, but nothing about the film that really put it over the top for me.

Part of the problem is that the plot is very similar to Pixar's "Monsters, Inc."--strange creatures come across a human baby and must return it to its home and family--and since the parallel was there it's hard not to make comparisons between the two with "Ice Age" coming out as the lesser movie.

For instance, the characters. Manny the Mammoth is the defensive one, Sid the Sloth is the stupid one and Diego the Sabre-Toothed Tiger is the double-agent with his own nasty agenda... these are all characters with "issues" and because of that it's hard to find someone to cheer for. By comparison, Sully and Mike of "Monsters, Inc." are both at heart good-guys and it's easier to be drawn into their problems and antics with the kid they're babysitting because we LIKE them from the moment they appear on the screen.

Also, Manny's relationship with the baby--who is never really give a name outright but mainly referred to as Pinky... Manny's defensive nature is explained in the film to be the result of his own family (wife and kid) being killed by hunters. Despite it being a little odd that Manny would even agree to help the offspring of the murders of his own family, his relationship with the kid is essentially "I don't like you. Don't make me like you. I'm telling you-- oh, you've now wormed your way into my heart." Plus the rest of the baby's interaction with the other characters and much of the humour in the film is based around the concept "I don't want to hold the baby, you hold the baby!"

Still, it is a good film and Blue Sky should be given a solid pat on the back for making such a strong first effort. I predict good things to come from them--including "Ice Age II" if the rumours prove correct. At any rate, "Ice Age" is worth seeing, just not a must-see.