Jul. 18, 2012 - Issue #874: Musician’s Survival Guide: Songwriters on Songwriting
Ice Age: Continental Drift
It's the obsessiveness and physical antics of Scrat, the acorn-crazed squirrel, who splits apart the earth in pursuit of his love, that provide the only constant humour. A movie just focussing on his nutty quest would've been more daring and fun than what we get. Instead, the all-out surrealism and manic slapstick that animation can do so well are dwarfed by adventures with pirates and a clichéd teen-fitting-in story (amid all that, the quasi-looniness of the continental drift hyper-rift, with ice shelfs breaking off and mountain ranges popping up in split-seconds, is jarring).
At least there's the black humour and clever use of 3D in the short preceding the lumbering mammoth of the main event. It's a Maggie Simpson cartoon that both touchingly and cuttingly returns the soother-suckling tyke to the Ayn Rand School for Tots for a preschool adventure. I'll take some skewering of that awful Atlas Shrugged author over a shruggingly predictable family-values animal-cartoon any day.
Directed by Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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