Ice Age Super Cool Edition With Movie (2002)

USA Today
"...A delight....ICE AGE deserves to pass animation's survival-of-the-fittest test..." 03/15/2002 p.4E

Total Film
"...ICE AGE has some groundbreakingly realistic digimation and plenty of laughs. Think a prehistoric JUNGLE BOOK..." 04/01/2002 p.106

Box Office
"...There's enough cool fun here to warm the hearts of animation enthusiasts of all ages..." 05/01/2002 p.60

Los Angeles Times
"...Chris Wedge has done nifty, amusing things on the visual side....His style is a kind of storybook photo-realism, giving those characters the unusual look of living and breathing plush toys..." 03/15/2002 p.C25

Sight and Sound
"...The film's stylized, blocky humans and personable, exaggerated creatures have the feel of three-dimensional cartoons....There are emotional resonances beyond the obvious..." 05/01/2002 p.47

Variety
"...There's something matter-of-factly astonishing about the vivid precision of key details....Arresting and often laugh-out-loud funny..." 03/18/2002 p.23-30

Chicago Sun-Times
"...A pleasure to look at....The visuals are rich with character touches for the animals..." 06/02/2002 p.6

ReelViews 8 of 10
Wisely, the previews for Ice Age only give glimpses of the pedestrian main plot. Instead, they center on the devilishly clever, exceedingly enjoyable interludes featuring the aforementioned rodent in situations and circumstances that recall the great animated work of the recently departed Chuck Jones. In fact, it got to the point where I was becoming irritated by the movie's main plot - I wanted to see the squirrel again. All told, he makes about five appearances (totaling maybe 10 minutes of screen time). The rest of the movie is concerned with the escapades of a woolly mammoth, a sloth, a sabertooth tiger, and a human baby who tries unsuccessfully to be as cute as Monsters Inc.'s Boo...Ice Age's director is Chris Wedge, whose only previous experience behind the camera was making an animated short called "Bunny". His first foray into feature filmmaking is successful, although Ice Age is not a standout in the still-small subgenre of computer animated films. It's perfectly acceptable family entertainment - the kind of movie that parents can take their children to without worrying about inappropriate content (for either the youngsters or the adults). And, sometimes, that's about all you can ask for from a movie. - James Berardinelli
 
Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
"Ice Age" is a pleasure to look at and scarcely less fun as a story. I came to scoff and stayed to smile. I confess the premise did not inspire me: A woolly mammoth, a sabertooth tiger and a sloth team up to rescue a human baby and return it to its parents. Uh, huh. But Peter Ackerman's screenplay is sly and literate, and director Chris Wedge's visual style so distinctive and appealing that the movie seduced me...Enormous advances have been made in animation technology in recent years, as computers have taken over the detail work and freed artists to realize their visions. But few movies have been as painterly as "Ice Age," which begins with good choices of faces for the characters (note the sabertooth's underslung jaw and the sloth's outrigger eyes). The landscape is convincing without being realistic, the color palette is harmonious, the character movements include little twists, jiggles, hesitations and hops that create personality. And the animals blossom as personalities...That's because of the artwork, the dialogue and the voice-over work by the actors; the filmmakers have all worked together to really see and love these characters, who are not "cartoon animals" but as quirky and individual as human actors, and more engaging than most. - Roger Ebert