Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

(Cert U)
Film still: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

The third movie in the animated Ice Age series is in 3D and good value for a family outing. The film's most engaging character, the prehistoric half-squirrel, half-rat creature called Scrat, is still, Sisyphus-like, pushing an acorn up moraine and down glacier getting nowhere. In this episode, however, he's "twitterpated" as they say in Bambi's wood, finding love with Scratte, a foxy female scrat who makes his life a misery. Meanwhile, the Ice Age family led by the mammoths Manny (voiced by Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) continue their journey with Ellie heavily pregnant and having trouble with "hormonal imbalance", a phrase that would have had Walt Disney snapping his paintbrush in horror. Sid, the dim-witted sloth (a lisping John Leguizamo) discovers three enormous eggs in an ice cave, which turn out when hatched to be baby dinosaurs. He adopts them as his own only to run into trouble with their fearsome mother and other Jurassic monsters and has to be rescued by his friends with the help of Buck, a gallant one-eyed British weasel (Simon Pegg).

  1. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
  2. Production year: 2009
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): U
  5. Runtime: 94 mins
  6. Directors: Carlos Saldanha, Mike Thurmeier
  7. Cast: Denis Leary, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Ray Romano, Seann William Scott, Simon Pegg
  8. More on this film

There are exciting, inventive, well-drawn chases involving ferocious dinosaurs that will have very small children putting out a hand for parental comfort while keeping their 3D specs adjusted with the other. "I liked you people better when you were extinct," Manny remarks. There's a lot of sentimental stuff about parental love. The endearingly thick Sid mistakes a female dinosaur's tail for a penis and a prehistoric ram's private parts for a teat and udder, which will have parents casting sideways glances at their kids. The fastidious will be annoyed by the continuing Hollywood assumption that every period in the past has been like the American present, and that all animals behave and talk as if they were members of suburban or small-town US families. And most adults will find it at least 20 minutes too long.

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