There is no doubt that the Ice Age films are not the most historically-accurate depiction of the time period that they seek to rediscover. However, as the films progress, they become even less of a representation of what they were supposed to depict in the first place, and just start using it as an aesthetic for stories that have nothing to do with it. I will explore the pop-culture references in a later article, but for now I will just focus on the historical inaccuracies in general.
"Everyone Loves Dinosaurs, Right?"
According to TV Tropes, the creators were concerned about putting dodos into the first film. The response from most paleontologists? "Whatever, just please, no dinosaurs". As a result, the only time we see a dinosaur is during a scene in which Sid is disturbed to find one encased in ice.
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| Concept art of the dinosaur encased in ice. |
It's not anything too major though - it's just an amusing gag. Otherwise, all of the animals we see are ones that would have been around during the Ice Age itself or, if nothing else, came around after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The second film even has a Gastornis mentioning that dinosaurs went extinct in order to counter Manny's point about large mammals like himself being too tough to go extinct themselves. After all, she's technically a descendant of the dinosaurs. She should know.
The third film however is all about dinosaurs. Sure, it can be justified in that the heroes travel to a lost realm in which a bunch of dinosaurs survived, but they still have dinosaurs. It kind of distracts from the original idea of the movies, which was to focus on creatures on the Ice Age that maybe some people weren't familiar with. Everyone is familiar with dinosaurs though. And we've received so many films involving them anyway - Jurassic Park, The Land Before Time, the dinosaur sequence in Animal World, Dinosaur, etc. For all I know, Ice Age 3 doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the table with regard to dinosaurs, apart from show ones that we don't often see such as the Kentrosaurus, the Harpactognathus and the Baryonyx. It just exists because people like dinosaurs and because the character designer stated that he "was running out of Ice Age characters" (p. 102).
Dinosaurs appear again in the fifth film, with regard to Gavin and his children Gertie and Roger. Despite being the main antagonists of that movie, they don't really do much except plan to sabotage the herd's plans. They even change their evil ways in the end and help save the day. In this case, it seems to be more so they can bring back characters from the third movie like Buck.
And as for the spin-off movie...why are you still even using the Ice Age title anymore? It's called The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, but the fact that they go back to the lost world just suggests that it should have been called The Lost World Adventures of Buck Wild. They really seem to like the dinosaur angle at this point, even though the whole point of the first movie was that it tried hard NOT to show dinosaurs. It's probably why it was a Buck-centric film in the first place.
Another item that is found frozen in the first film is a spaceship, which the baby gives a Vulcan salute to. Again, it is just that - a simple gag. Once we see that spaceship, the plot moves on and that's it. Otherwise, the first itself is relatively down to earth and the sequels, to a certain extent, stay away from science fiction and fantasy itself. The spaceship is just something that stands out for laughs.
For some reason, they decided to expand upon it in the fifth movie. This has been a sin that has occurred throughout the franchise - first it was expanding the role of the dinosaurs, and then it was turning the continental drift ending of Gone Nutty into a whole movie. This one is handled worst though. Scrat ends up inside an UFO that goes into space and ends up kick-starting a chain of events that cause asteroids to nearly wipe out Earth. He also meets up with alien squirrels with more advanced technology. Sure, this is all in space and the advanced technology aspect should make it more forgivable, but as I said before, this sort of thing distracts from the prehistoric aspect of the franchise.
Other Time Periods Explored
At least with the dinosaurs, it seems that the creators did put effort into utilising them correctly. They showed off dinosaurs that aren't often seen in other movies and at least used the excuse that they were in a hidden world.
There is no real excuse for the other time periods the later movies try to explore. One example is the fourth film's depiction of continental drift. The real life phenomenon occurred sometime beforehand, and was a more gradual change. In this one, it happens within a very short time span due to Scrat's escapades with his acorn. This was perfectly fine as a gag in the Academy-nominated short film Gone Nutty, in which it served as a bit of a pay-off to what was already a brilliant short. But in the aptly named fourth movie, it's essentially the whole plot. All it is is just an extended version of the short's ending, only this time used as a "dramatic" way to move the plot along.
Director Michael Thurmier, who started with Ice Age 3, says that "every sequel it seems to get a little harder to keep the story fresh, because you have already done all these great gags. You have had all these great character interactions. You have explored territories and the personalities, but you have to keep mining new territories" (p. 140). I mean, that's all well said, but that's usually why you just move onto something else where you can explore these things, rather than resurrect the same franchise over and over again. You don't need to resurrect the same gags and make up new stuff at the expense of the quality that's already there. If you're running out of stuff from the actual Ice Age period to explore, LEAVE IT.
I call this section of this chapter "Other Time Periods Explored", but it's not just time periods. Festivities get explored too. We have the Christmas special A Mammoth Christmas and the Easter special The Great Egg-Scapade. The former focuses on Sid trying to get off Santa's naughty list (for something that was actually an accident) and the latter focuses on an Easter egg hunt designed to get back some eggs that Squint the bunny stole. It also explores the "origins" of April Fool's Day for some reason. I have genuinely mixed feelings about these specials. On the one hand, they go for a more secular route than the Christian vibes they were given during the Roman times and do a relatively good job at providing an Ice Age twist on this origins (moreso with the Easter special). On the other hand, it should be pointed out that these now-thought-as-Christian holidays actually started as Pagan celebrations - Christmas has links with Yule and the Roman festival of Saturnalia, whilst Easter has links with the spring festival of Ostara - and given the way that the Pagans were completely undermined in the past, it makes the changes in the backstory for Christmas and Easter come off as rather awkward. Besides, given that DreamWorks has done its own holiday specials for their franchises, it's most likely that Ice Age was simply trying to jump on the bandwagon.
Space, Mysticism & All That "Good" Stuff
Another item that is found frozen in the first film is a spaceship, which the baby gives a Vulcan salute to. Again, it is just that - a simple gag. Once we see that spaceship, the plot moves on and that's it. Otherwise, the first itself is relatively down to earth and the sequels, to a certain extent, stay away from science fiction and fantasy itself. The spaceship is just something that stands out for laughs.
For some reason, they decided to expand upon it in the fifth movie. This has been a sin that has occurred throughout the franchise - first it was expanding the role of the dinosaurs, and then it was turning the continental drift ending of Gone Nutty into a whole movie. This one is handled worst though. Scrat ends up inside an UFO that goes into space and ends up kick-starting a chain of events that cause asteroids to nearly wipe out Earth. He also meets up with alien squirrels with more advanced technology. Sure, this is all in space and the advanced technology aspect should make it more forgivable, but as I said before, this sort of thing distracts from the prehistoric aspect of the franchise.
It's not just space that gets explored. There is a place named Geotopia that pops up, which is essentially a lost world inside an asteroid that crashed long ago. The residents are all essentially zen hippies who are using the crystals in the asteroid to stay young. When one of the crystals is removed by Sid and he unwittingly causes the wall to collapse, they all grow old again, and only regain their youth once the fountain of youth is created.
Now, I was just like to say that I have nothing against mysticism in general. But it does NOT match up with the original idea for the movie franchise. In fact, it distracts from it. As I said earlier, the original movies were relatively down to earth, making the mystical elements clash even more. There was an earlier case in Ice Age 4 with the whole Scratlantis scene, but at least that was a quick gag scene at the end of the movie, rather than something that played a major role in it. It didn't help that the Geotopia plot is tacked onto Act 3, and yet is still made to feel like the whole movie.
The film is not only historically inaccurate, but also scientifically inaccurate with regard to its climax. Throughout the film, the herd have been trying to find a way to stop meteorites destroying Earth. The solution? Shove giant crystals into a volcano so that it erupts and the ensuring explosion stops the meteors from landing. There's some crummy explanation as to why they're doing this too - apparently, the crystals are magnetic and therefore their magnetism should send the meteors off course.
NO. JUST NO. When an asteroid goes through our atmosphere, it freezes up very quickly. The heat from the erupting volcano, clashing with the meteors that have gone cold from entering our atmosphere would most likely cause an unstable reaction that would cause more death. Never mind the fact that those "magnetic crystals" would supposedly repel the asteroids away. In fact, if the magnetism ploy hadn't worked, it would have essentially smashed the volcano to pieces and then caused a bigger explosion that would wipe out everything around it and render the plan a waste of time.
At least Ice Age 2 acknowledged scientific inaccuracy with regard to volcanoes during one scene. The mini sloths in that movie are aware that sacrificing "Fire King" Sid to the volcano probably isn't going to help much, but they decide to do it anyway since "it's worth a shot". It's a relatively minor scene compared to everything else, and the whole thing is just played as a joke at Sid's expense. Even the contrived way in which Sid suffers this sad fate is played for laughs. In Ice Age 5 though, the volcano scenario plays too much of a major role to be missed out on, especially since it's what's used to resolve the plot. Plus, they talk about it earlier on as if it's something scientifically accurate, without taking into account the combination of the heat and the cold. Not helping is the fact that they use a character who I highly dislike and will rant about later to explain this.
What happened to the producer's original point? Why did the franchise start with proper focus on the period being explored and then just start delving into other periods? In the first two films, it feels like they're actually staying focused, but in the later ones, the setting is just used as a "cool" aesthetic rather than anything else.
You can accuse me of getting too nit-picky about something that's meant to be a comedy anyway, but there's a difference between a well-written historically-inaccurate comedy and a poorly-written historically-inaccurate comedy. Take the Asterix comics for instance. In a similar vein to Ice Age, it very loosely depicts the time period that it's set in, in this case the time of the Roman Empire. But the excellent writing of the comics - excluding the ones from the 90s and early to mid 00s like Asterix and the Falling Sky, which bares an uncomfortable resemblance to Ice Age 5 with its alien plot and doesn't have the original writer - and the parodic and anarchic nature of them in general more than makes up for it. The same goes with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is essentially a spoof of the King Arthur legends. With the later Ice Age films, they're not spoofs at all. They are simply held together by a thin plot and some questionable pop-culture references, which I will delve into later.
And speaking of later, the stuff I will be discussing in the next chapters makes the problems I just discussed here seem pretty minuscule in comparison...
