There are no barriers to entry in “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” an animated action/adventure/comedy co-directed by Carlos Saldanha and Mike Thurmeier.
Eschewing preposterous histrionic drama for prehistorical delight, the movie easily gets you to suspend the thinking part of your brain and embark on a prehistoric odyssey. At the end, you realize you’ve also been thinking, but the thoughts have come in quietly, intuitively.
Wow.
Still on the move to elude the coming Ice Age, Ellie (voice of Queen Latifah) is having a child with Manny (voice of Ray Romano). This threatens to disturb the cozy herd-ness of the unlikely clan from two prior movies. Bachelors Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (voice of John Leguizamo) skulk off to start a new life.
Brooding Sid adopts a trio of newborn dinosaur chicks; their mother, a thunderous T-Rex, is not pleased. He gets Sid-napped by an even larger dinosaur in an extraordinary underground place that shows dinosaurs aren’t extinct. The clan comes together to rescue him, Ellie has her daughter, Peaches, Diego and Sid decide they’ll be perfect uncles for newborn mammoth, end of story.
The themes are right there before you. Loyalty, family (even when it consists of a series of unlikely members), covering one another’s back, teamwork, sacrifice, camaraderie. The movie says a family is a family, no matter what the circumstances; it’s not defined by birth certificates and blood lines. They are apparent from the first moment and carry through to the final scene. They’re articulated with a consistent register. Each and every scene is conveyed with a sense of enchantment and wonder.
The story is universal in its appeal. Whether you’re watching it in Des Moines or Dublin or Dubai, people can relate to its message. Though portrayed, variously, as sloths, tigers, wooly mammoths, weasels, and all the dinosaurs you can learn about at the La Brea Tar Pits, the characters have the exact same sort of traits, quirks of personalities, idiosyncrasies, and, mostly, responsibilities, that any family would have.
There’s no absolute scale of size and attendant effects, everything is relative and organic to the story being told.
Thus, a waterfall of lava that falls into a chasm of fire is just-right, given the proportionate scale of everything else. When a swashbuckling weasel, Buck (voice of Simon Pegg), pilots a bird through narrow valleys to escape from other murderous birds, we don’t get dizzy to the point of nausea. Wooing Scratte (voice of Karen Disher), a foxy, red-haired squirrel, Scrat (voice of Chris Wedge) gets pulverized, knocked around, roughed up but it’s the same way that Wile E. Coyote gets portrayed in the Roadrunner cartoons.
It’s a great film because it tells a story that reverberates with the audience, with no cheap effects, on a scale that doesn’t detract from the narrative. It’s also tutelary: we get entertained but we also learn about what it means to belong to a family unit. That’s always a good message.
But what’s unique here is the way that it’s presented: just-right.
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