Ice Age is a 2002 American animated adventure comedy film directed by Chris Wedge and written by Michael Berg, Michael J. Wilson, and Peter Ackerman. Produced by 20th Century Fox Animation and Blue Sky Studios (in the latter's debut film), it features an ensemble voice cast, including Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, and Denis Leary in their main roles, with Jane Krakowski, Jack Black, and Goran Višnjić in their supporting roles. Set during the days of the Pleistocene ice age, the film centers around an unlikely herd of three mammals—Manny, a no-nonsense woolly mammoth, Sid, a loudmouthed ground sloth, and Diego, a sardonic smilodon—who come across a human baby and work together to return it to its tribe.
Ice Age was originally conceived by Fox Animation Studios as a traditionally animated film, but became a full-length CGI film from Blue Sky, which had been transformed from a visual effects house to a computer animation studio. Focus shifted from making an action-adventure drama film to a more comedy-oriented one, and several writers, including Berg and Ackerman, were brought on to lighten the tone. David Newman composed and conducted the film's musical score, making it the second 20th Century Fox animated film to be scored by Newman after Anastasia.
Ice Age was released in the United States on March 15, 2002 by 20th Century Fox. The film received generally positive reviews from critics and was a box office success, grossing $383 million, and becoming the eighth highest-grossing film and the highest-grossing animated film of 2002. It was nominated at the 75th Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. It spawned a franchise, consisting of several sequels starting with Ice Age: The Meltdown in 2006, as well as spin-offs, specials, shorts, and video games.
Plot
A herd of prehistoric animals is migrating south to avoid a forthcoming ice age. Sid, a clumsy ground sloth, is left behind by his family and personally chases the herd. After being attacked by a pair of brontotheres, Sid is reluctantly rescued by Manfred "Manny", a surly woolly mammoth who did not migrate with the others. Sid insists on following Manny, but the latter wishes to be alone and is annoyed by Sid's outgoing demeanor.
Some time before these events, a human tribe hunted and killed half of a Smilodon pack for their pelts. Soto, the leader of the surviving saber-toothed tigers, leads a raid on the human camp, intending to exact revenge by personally killing Roshan, the infant son of the chief. Soto has his lieutenant Diego bring the baby to him alive. Roshan's mother, however, flees with her son and leaps over a waterfall. Soto orders Diego to pursue Roshan and bring him back alive, threatening to kill him if he fails.
Manny and Sid encounter Roshan and his injured mother in the river at the bottom of the falls. The woman leaves the baby with them, but is washed away. Sid attempts to return the baby to the human settlement, but finds the camp deserted. Diego offers to take the baby, but a mistrustful Manny orders Diego to track the humans instead. Diego complies, but that night, he secretly sends word back to Soto that he is bringing both the baby and a mammoth for the pack to eat.
After several misadventures and bonding moments during their adventure, the trio travel through an ice cave and discovers human cave paintings. Though Manny experiences a flashback of his family being killed by humans, he has become deeply attached to Roshan. Diego, beginning to doubt his mission, changes sides after Manny saves him from a lava flow. He informs Manny and Sid about Soto's pack waiting to ambush them at Half Peak. Though the pair are skeptical, having learned they were set up, Diego convinces them their only chance is to trust him.
Manny, Sid, and Diego plot to trick the pack of cats and escape. This initially works, but Soto and two others manage to corner Manny at a cliff edge. Diego attacks Soto and saves Manny, but is severely injured in the process. Soto is thrown against an overhanging rock and is killed by falling icicles, which prompts the rest of his pack to flee.
As Manny and Sid grieve for Diego, he convinces them to leave him and return the baby to the humans before the mountain passes fill with snow. Manny and Sid catch up to the humans and Roshan reunites with his father, who gifts Manny the shell and bead necklace he had for his son. Diego, having survived his injuries, catches up just in time to say goodbye to Roshan, and the reunited trio, now best friends, head back south towards warmer climates.
Voice cast
Ray Romano as Manfred "Manny", a woolly mammoth John Leguizamo as Sid, a ground sloth Denis Leary as Diego, a Smilodon Goran Višnjić as Soto, a Smilodon Jack Black as Zeke, a Smilodon Cedric the Entertainer as Carl, an Embolotherium Stephen Root as Frank, a Megacerops and father Start, a Palaeotherium Diedrich Bader as Oscar, a Smilodon Alan Tudyk as Lenny, a Homotherium Jane Krakowski and Lorri Bagley as Rachel and Jennifer, respectively, a pair of female giant ground sloths Chris Wedge as Scrat, of a fictitious species of saber-toothed squirrel Tara Strong as Roshan, a human infant. He is never referred to by name in the film, instead being nicknamed "Pinky" by Manny.
Production Development Ice Age was originally pitched to 20th Century Fox in 1997 by producer Lori Forte. The film, originally envisioned as a traditionally animated movie with an action-oriented comedy-drama tone, was intended to be developed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman's Fox Animation Studios. Around the same time, Blue Sky Studios, a small visual effects studio in White Plains, New York, was bought out by Fox and reshaped into a full-fledged CG animation film studio. In light of this, Fox Animation head Chris Meledandri and executive producer Steve Bannerman approached Forte with the proposition of developing the film as a computer-animated movie, which Forte realized was "basically a no-brainer", according to her.
Michael J. Wilson, who had written and developed the film's original story treatments in conjunction with Forte, wrote the first draft for the script, and Chris Wedge, a co-founder of Blue Sky, was brought on to the project as the director in late 1998. Fox also opted for the movie to take a more comedy-oriented direction, and brought writer Michael Berg to help emphasize a more comedic tone. After being hired, Berg reportedly told the studio that he could not write a film made for children, to which the studio responded, "Great! Just write a good story."
Story development began in spring 1999, and official production on the film began in June 2000, one week after the closure of Fox Animation Studios. 150 employees were hired to work on the film, and a budget of $58 million was granted by Fox. Peter Ackerman was hired as a third writer for the film, and collaborated extensively with Berg for three years before the two eventually moved on from the project. Jon Vitti and Mike Reiss, both former writers for The Simpsons, were added later on after Berg and Ackerman left to further polish the script.
For research, the film's development team took several trips to the Museum of Natural History early on in production in order to make sure that the film authentically felt like the Ice Age. Ultimately, the team translated the information that they had compiled in their research by stylizing it in order to fit with the film's story. A team of 32 animators went out and did research to figure out the movements of different animals; for instance, for the movement of Scrat, animators visited a park and observed local squirrels, taking note of their "twitchy" way of moving.
Writing and character development Michael J. Wilson stated on his blog that his daughter Flora came up with the idea for an animal that was a mixture of both squirrel and rat, naming it Scrat, and that the animal was obsessed with pursuing his acorn. The plan to have Scrat talk was quickly dropped, as he worked better as a silent character for comedic effect. The name 'Scrat' is a combination of the words 'squirrel' and 'rat', as Scrat has characteristics of both species. Wedge has also called him "saber-toothed squirrel".
Scrat's opening adventure was inserted because, without it, the first real snow and ice sequence wouldn't take place until about 37 minutes into the film. This was the only role intended for Scrat, but he proved to be such a popular character with test audiences that he was given more scenes. The filmmakers made it so that many of the scenes with Scrat appear directly after dramatic moments in the film.
In a 2012 interview with Jay Leno, Denis Leary revealed that his character, Diego, originally died near the end of the film. However, it was reported that kids in the test audience burst into tears when his death was shown. Leary warned the producers that something like this would happen. When it was proven true, the scene was re-written to ensure Diego survived.
Originally, Sid was supposed to be a con-artist and a hustler, and there was a finished scene of the character conning some aardvark kids. His character was later changed to a talkative-clumsy sloth because the team felt the audience would have disliked him. There was an alternate scene of Sid in the hottub with the ladies which shows him saying to them "Let's jump in the gene pool and see what happens." One of the female sloths then kicks him in the groin. This was cut because it was not suitable for children and may have gotten the film a PG-13 rating by the MPAA. Other innuendos with Sid were cut from the film. Sid was supposed to have a female sloth named Sylvia, voiced by Kristen Johnston, who was interested in him and chased after him, despite his dislike for her and his tendency to ditch her. All the removed scenes can be seen on the DVD.
Animation The characters and environments in Ice Age were modeled and animated using WaveFront's Maya animation software. Rendering was completed using CGI Studio, an in-house ray tracing program being developed since Blue Sky's formation in 1987 and previously used for Wedge's 1998 short film, Bunny. While Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, released three months before Ice Age, became the first computer-animated film to make use of ray tracing technology, Ice Age would have received the distinction had it been released at the time Blue Sky began work on the movie.
In order to keep the film at a more exciting pace, the development team took certain liberties with Sid in terms of realism. Although real-life ground sloths were slow-moving and rigid, Sid was given a fast movement speed in certain scenes, as well as a more flexible range of motions. Conversely, the character's arm movements were more restricted in order to retain a sense of laziness true to the nature of sloths. Manny was a particularly difficult character to animate due to his unique attributes as a mammoth, such as his long fur and massive trunk that covered up his face.
Dealing with a creature which had seldom appeared in animation at the time, the team needed to figure out how Manny would realistically move with character designer Peter de Sève explaining that "a wooly mammoth isn't simply an elephant with long fur". According to co-director Carlos Saldanha, Diego was one of the most complexly animated characters in the movie, with some scenes showing off his high movement speed as a sabre-toothed tiger while others kept his movement more contained and focused on his facial expressions to carry the moment.
Voice casting The voice cast of Ice Age was encouraged to make up their own dialogue during recording. Several lines in the film were improvised by the actors.