Film Review Colon Ice Age Colon Continental Drift

   So, it's Friday, apparently the thirteenth, which, as everybody on the internet seems intent to remind me, is Friday the Thirteenth. Huh. I didn't really think of today that way till it was pointed out to me. Nope, what I thought of today being as, "the day when they come out with yet another one of those Ice Age movies." Alright!

   This time, it's about pirates. In a series about the ice age (and dinosaurs and melting ice,) the continents start drifting, which leads to sea travel, which leads to pirates. The entire thing could be summed up as going Pirates of the Caribbean by way of Rango, as a sequel to Ice Age. As a sequel to Ice Age. One gets the feeling that it wasn't originally intended to be. Still, if the film is based off of a completely different script adapted into the series, they did it very well. I still don't know where they got the idea of pirates, but, it's actually pretty cool.

   Anyway.

   In an apparently canonical and not-at-all hallucinatory sequence, Scrat's pursuit of finding an acorn burial place actually causes him to drop to the center of the earth and rotate its core around all crazy-like, causing Pangaea to break up (1. Didn't the first film have humans in it? What's Pangaea doing here anyway? By the time the films take place, the continents should look very much like they are now. 2. The entire thing with the rotation of the core is kind of like that one movie, only the opposite. You know, the one with the earth's core? The... core movie. Oh, if only I could remember its name...)

   Make no bones about it. This film is a cartoon. In 3D, and featuring state-of-the-art particle physics effects, but a cartoon nonetheless: the liberal use of the "stretch and squash" feature leads to some of the film's funniest moments. Here, it's used as Scrat does some physically impossible things that need to be seen to be believed, and, well, all you need to know now is that it leads to the titular continental drift, with the landmasses breaking apart rapidly.

   Enter into this cracking world our heroes, a motley assortment of prehistoric mammals assembled over the three previous films, along with some new faces, most notably Granny, Sid's granny whose name is also apparently literally Granny, dropped off and abandoned by Sid's fond-of-dropping-off-and-abandoning-family-members family. Manny and Ellie, meanwhile, having a bit of a hassle controlling their daughter Peaches, who has a crush on another mammoth, Ethan, oblivious to the fact that her best friend Louis the molehog is crushing on her (interspecies romance cool? Peaches herself may or may not be half opossum (which doesn't really make sense considering how certain possum, um, anatomy makes interspeciated breeding almost impossible which is what leads to their being such a longstanding species in the first place (I mean, look at them, they've hardly evolved from then to now, unlike the practically unrecognizable hey-I'm-an-alien-from Pitch Black sloths.))) (Diego's own problems are coming up later.) All of this is fairly expected, standard, straightforward character stuff.

   Cracks appear in the ground, the entire ice shelf breaks off, and Manny is separated from his family, with a promise to meet at the land bridge. Alright. So our valiant main three heroes set out adrift on an ice floe raft with no steering or anything, a big storm approaching, the whole nine yards, while back on land the extended cast and the rest of the animals set out trekking toward the land bridge in order to escape the continental drift (both voyages recalling early theories as to how fossils of the same species were found so widely around the world before they came out with the tectonic plates theory. The writers clearly put a lot of thought into this and did their research. Oh, goody.)

   It is here, out on the open sea (where else?) where Manny, Sid (and Granny) and Diego come across  the pirates, led by the infamous Cap'n Gutt, an orangutan who'll, you know, gut you if given a second chance; and his first mate Shira, a saber-tooth tiger enemy mine love interest for Diego, who is given unexpectedly deep characterization, which makes sense come to think of it with potential sequels in mind. The film juggles all of these characters and their respective arcs quite admirably while still having time for all that zaniness the series is known for, so, why would adding a few more characters to the series suddenly snap the camel's back?

   (Still, what would the next one be about? We've already used up cavemen and Stonehenge and "Send Me on My Way," global warming and a talking animal Noah's Ark, insane weasels and dinosaurs and Scratté, and now plate tectonics and prehistoric piracy and Ewoks doing an homage to Braveheart, so what's next? The Garden of Eden? It certainly can't be Atlantis, now, unfortunately, seeing as how Scrat manages to sink "Scratlantis," (which I think is the first time that the nomenclature of the squirrel-rat is actually namedropped within any of the films (and yet everyone knows his name- speaking of Ewoks...)) Though it could have been a fake Atlantis? But, with all its classical architecture and cool blues, we are led to believe that this is the real Atlantis. (So maybe humans are still around? Someone would have to preserve that legend...) Still, the color scheme kind of bothers me, as the real Atlantis should have had a lot more copper reds. I'm a bit of a wonk, you see. The secret of Atlantis was orichalcum, after all. Or a secret of Atlantis, at least. So, with the real Atlantis, maybe that's still open? I mean, Scrat causing the continents to drift was first used in the short "Gone Nutty" (told you I was a wonk), so hopefully that's still open.)

   Anyway, all in all, a much better film than it needs to be.  Ships made entirely out of ice beg the invention of a new punk subgenre (freezepunk?), and although it doesn't look like humans are still around in this world, orangutans prove that primates still are. We have no choice but to postulate that somewhere along the line, the timelines split up, and the Ice Age series takes place in an alternate history where cartoon physics causes sentient animals to be the dominant lifeform on Earth instead of humans, what with Mount Scratmore, Screaster Island and the Scrinx. That is literally the only explanation that makes sense.

   The fact that Lamarckian evolution (at least with giraffes) also seems to exist in this universe may either negate or prove this theory, but, we'll see.