I went to a private screening of Ice Age yesterday (Saturday) morning and my general feeling is that Disney and Pixar don’t have a lot to worry about. Although cute, the story started off very slowly and the characters seemed very contrived to me… It’s more or less a buddy movie about three odd animals (wooly mammoth, sloth and saber tooth tiger) that go on a trip to return a human baby to its tribe… In the end, the movie was cute and it probably won’t do that bad in the theaters but… The animation stunk big time. I mean, Pixar was miles ahead of them with the original Toy Story. The backgrounds were very, very unexciting. You would think that it mostly being snow would be enough but they somehow found a way to make even a flat white or grey background look skimpy for what it was supposed to be. You also won’t find any of the snow landing on fur type effects that you go in Monsters Inc… Although the overall animation of the animal characters was not that bad, their animation of humans was absolutely horrible. I swear, I could do a better job in Poser than they did. Not only do they look incredibly oversimplified, they movie like robots from some old black and white sci-fi movie… The human animation in this movie makes what they did in Shrek look ground-breaking… I wouldn’t tell anyone with kids not to go see it because kids tend to not be as picky about this sort of stuff as I am. The humor in some parts is funny and the story, as cheesy as I made it sound, ends up not being all that bad but they could have done a much, much better job with the animation IMHO.
