I'm going to pull a Fred here and post a mini review in the comments; the movie was better than I expected, but in an enjoyable-cartoon-movie way, not a engaging-story-Pixar-or-recent-DreamWorks way. It was not boring, which has been a problem with movies all summer; movies have been bad before, but God, what a bunch of bland badness this year has put out. Ice Age 4 is not bland, at least.
It kind of flips Ice Age one around; that movie had decent story chops (for the time, anyway, during which Disney couldn't tell a story to save its soul, DreamWorks hadn't figured out that was why the first Shrek worked and Pixar had taken the year off), but is actually pretty hard to watch due to very dated CGI. This movie pretty much jettisons story for beautiful animation. It is a story about very furry (in the "covered in the fur" sense) characters on water, both very hard to animate, and both animated beautifully here.
Character design is consistent with older movies (a challenge given what I just said last paragraph), and new characters fit in with old characters. The humor is hit or miss, mostly miss, admittedly, for me, though Sid offhandedly commenting on dinosaurs in the ice age was probably the best joke. Seriously, I have no idea what the hell the is happening in this movie with the plate tectonics or whatever. Not because I don't know about plate tectonics, but because this movie doesn't. There is a natural disaster that is forcing the herd of herbivores to move, but it doesn't have a name because it doesn't exist outside of this movie. That, and I don't think hurricanes work that way either. Or icebergs. Or, you know, anything in this movie.
I liked the girl sabretooth. She had a cool character design.
I'm going to pull a Fred here and post a mini review in the comments; the movie was better than I expected, but in an enjoyable-cartoon-movie way, not a engaging-story-Pixar-or-recent-DreamWorks way. It was not boring, which has been a problem with movies all summer; movies have been bad before, but God, what a bunch of bland badness this year has put out. Ice Age 4 is not bland, at least.
It kind of flips Ice Age one around; that movie had decent story chops (for the time, anyway, during which Disney couldn't tell a story to save its soul, DreamWorks hadn't figured out that was why the first Shrek worked and Pixar had taken the year off), but is actually pretty hard to watch due to very dated CGI. This movie pretty much jettisons story for beautiful animation. It is a story about very furry (in the "covered in the fur" sense) characters on water, both very hard to animate, and both animated beautifully here.
Character design is consistent with older movies (a challenge given what I just said last paragraph), and new characters fit in with old characters. The humor is hit or miss, mostly miss, admittedly, for me, though Sid offhandedly commenting on dinosaurs in the ice age was probably the best joke. Seriously, I have no idea what the hell the is happening in this movie with the plate tectonics or whatever. Not because I don't know about plate tectonics, but because this movie doesn't. There is a natural disaster that is forcing the herd of herbivores to move, but it doesn't have a name because it doesn't exist outside of this movie. That, and I don't think hurricanes work that way either. Or icebergs. Or, you know, anything in this movie.
I liked the girl sabretooth. She had a cool character design.