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Final Thoughts Ice Age

OK, like I said, I like the music in this movie. The animation is OK, they do background and ice well and the lighting isn’t terribly done either. I like the way humans are portrayed as the silent and misunderstood other of the movie, the baby brings the animals together, but the humans are still confused and scared of the animals because they don’t speak the same languages. 

Humans and scenes of violence are the only quiet things about this movie. There is always talking and jokes but the humans have no words and when there is fighting people aren’t talking. The serious parts of the movie are without dialogue. I don’t know, I’m probably reading into it wrong, but I do like that the serious parts of the movie aren’t filled with corny stupid dialogue and the talking that does exist is worth hearing. 

I like the cave painting scene and the moment where Manny delivers the baby to his family the most, they’re touching and reach the core of this film. 

It’s about family and finding family when you don’t have one of your own in a traditional way. Sid, Diego, and Manny form a herd and a strong connection. They become a family even though they have nothing in common. They find themselves and each other. 

Even Sid and Diego manage to work something out even though Diego definitely still wants to eat him. 

“Dignity has nothing to do with it.” Love that line. 

Love Rusted Roots and On My Way. That song makes me smile NO MATTER WHAT is going on. 

Also the global warming joke at the end was not something I got as a kid but now i do a little “ha ha the apocalypse is coming” when I hear it 

The dodos made me think of this year and the doomsday feeling around us all the time, but thankfully those birds are wrong, there are so many more melons out there!

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Because I’m Your Only Chance

Straight up truth. Diego had already decided to help them, but the real moment of truth came when he told them about the ambush. Manny has to decide if he wants to trust Diego again. The decision was made ultimately because Diego was their only shot, he was the only one who could do anything at all about the strength of the pack. 

We then see the herd work together to save the baby once again and Diego prove that he has made his choice to be part of a herd and therefore have a family that actually cares about him. 

We get some good stuff in this scene. 

We also get the lovely moment of self sacrifice and Manny kicking butt and just all around great stuff from Diego. 

The lead saber fights them right until the end and the death in this movie is of course off screen. The only people who die are the saber and the mother which is interesting, it is a kid’s movie but they don’t shy away from getting rid of the villain and providing a death for the plot. The mother has to die to get the events moving, and the leader has to die to end the cycle of violence. 

Diego nearly dies trying to fight his old pack but he does it anyway because he has a new herd. It’s a good moment in the movie for sure. 

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The Baby Walks

Sid tries to call the baby over but even the baby realizes that Diego needs some love and attention before the others do. He gets a little hug from the thing he was once going to eat. So, it’s cute and sweet and it’s the moment that we all needed. A little Diego hugging. 

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Saving Private Diego

“That’s what you do in a herd, you look out for each other.”

Yeah. I don’t need to get too deep here. We know this is when Diego decides he can’t kill them and he needs to stop the pack from doing so. 

Manny saves Diego because despite everything he cares about them, even if it doesn’t seem like it. They’ve all decided to protect each other even though there was no reason to do so other than being stuck with each other. 

Diego just needs to have someone who loves him, that’s all he needs. He needs a real bond and not one formed from conveniences. So Diego gets rescued, realizes he needs to rescue them all in return. Good good stuff. 

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Cave Paintings

The animation change to show how Manny’s family perished at the hands of the hunters is a brilliant change. Manny realizing his life story seems to be on the walls of the cave is devastating, he just wants his life back. He wants a herd and he wants a family. 

Even Diego recognizes the powerful moment they are all witnessing, Manny is reliving the world he once knew and the hope he once had. He had a family once, he wasn’t always broken and lonely. He wants to get back to that place.

The hunters are so abstract looking they can barely be recognized, but the mammoths look like mammoths, just more moments of the humans taking a backseat to the animals in the story. Manny survived the trauma of his family being gone. 

Then the moment where he touches the baby mammoth on the wall and his trunk meets the baby’s hand.... OH GoD. Ok, I’m fine, I don’t actually need to cry. It’s just a great moment, the music swells and the light changes and things are just better. 

It’s also a pivotal moment for Diego, he is starting to understand that he can not betray them and he has to make a difficult choice. 

Then we swing back around to the baby’s dad, we still aren’t getting words, but we can see what is going on. He is holding the broken necklace (?) and remembering his family but he can’t find them, the dog’s have lost the trail and everything seems hopeless. 

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Short Cut

Yeah, right to my soul. 

First we have DIego deciding he is still on the side of his pack and not his someday herd. 

Then we have the scene where Manny realizes his family is dead and gone and he can’t do anything about that but he can make a new family and he can try to forgive. 

Also we’ve got evolution jokes, call outs to dinosaurs, ice sliding, and UFOs. AND Pinky doing the Spock call out, thanks for that little joke that I never really caught until today!

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On My Way

Best song in the movie, and a montage of traveling is the best way to move our plot line along without bothering with a lot of dialogue or anything else. 

This song is excellent and I love it, the scenes accompanying it our pretty cute as well, the glacier train, the geyser, snowball fights, and just Manny being the angry dad. 

Weird modern call outs though, why is old faithful near stonehenge? no one knows. 

ALSO ice skating, love that Sid is good at something for even a second, he needed a win. 

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Night Vision

This movie doesn’t have great animation, but whatever. Like I said, you can’t really do anything about that and you can look past it. 

But Diego’s attempt to steal the baby in the middle of the night and having his eyes glow in the dark is actually a fairly decent bit play on the light in the scene, good job team!

Next up we have Diego encountering his own kind and explaining that he is going to bring the baby to them as well as the mammoth, Diego has decided to kill Manny which wasn’t part of the original plan but whatever, opportunities have to present themselves sometimes, right?

And then we fall into the weird scene where Sid finally finds other sloths, but what? Aren’t they all heading south? Are they heading south now? Did I actually miss something? Probably. We get Carl and Frank back for a bit which is fine. 

“Pretty tail walks by and he moves like a cheetah” that line didn’t crack me up when I was a kid but now I like it XD

And we have the Manny wakes up without Pinky and freaks out, he has realized that he loves the little devil but still wouldn’t ever admit that to the others. 

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Dodo

Because it’s 2020 and we are literally living during the time of a virus outbreak and the apocalypse seems likely... Well. Dodos seem right. 

Doom on you, you didn’t get toilet paper

Doom on you, you didn’t get macaroni

Doom on you, your roots are going to be super obvious soon. 

Also the fact that all the dodos fall off the edge of the cliff and die because of a melon... Yeah, those birds are silly. 

Our three heroes cause the death of like half a species, or actually the whole species because the last female goes over the edge with the other idiots. So. Good job, y’all just caused extinction. 

And if any of the kiddos get the whole football joke with the melon and Sid I would be surprised, but good for this movie, sneaking in a little something for the parents who are stuck watching this XD

And then you see Sid do a little touchdown dance and smash the melon open like a complete ninny, that seems about right. 

This is the last time the heroes seem to feed the baby but that’s beside the point honestly. It’s a kid’s movie, we don’t need to think about things like starvation or diaper changing beyond like one or two scenes. 

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Glacier Pass

Got to love putting a time frame on a situation. Diego knows exactly what he is doing. Diego sets up the plot to the movie in this moment, they have the baby, they need to get it to the humans on the other side, we only have until tomorrow to do it. Great. Movie found. Solid. 

Also: Tigey Wigey is going to lead the way

Manny puts Diego in the lead so he can watch him, because a mammoth would definitely be able to take down a single saber tooth tiger, and that is facts. 

Also, what the heck is a baby thingy? Why does Manny have any idea at all about diapers. 

“Because you’re small and insignificant and I’ll pummel you if you don’t” 

that funny interaction followed by another poop joke, because we can only have a little bit of real humor before we break out the potty jokes. 

And then we roll onto another joke about low on the food chain, all of which crack me up. Diego should have eaten Sid, that’s just the truth 

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Mothers, Music, and Rivers

The scene where Manny takes the baby from his mother in the river has excellent music, good lighting, even decent background animation. It’s a well made scene, and very touching. 

It’s also the pivotal moment in the movie of course, they need to save the baby now, it’s a bond that forms and even if Manny wants to get rid of it he is now stuck with Sid and the baby. 

Manny tells Sid he just wants to watch him try and climb the waterfall, that he doesn’t care what happens but obviously that’s the only way he can stay behind and save face. Sid just immediately wants to help, proving that he really is the heart and soul of the operation, he saves the baby without even thinking.

And finally this scene introduces the best dynamic in the movie, Diego with Sid and Manny. He starts out by trying to steal the baby but Manny saves the baby and realizes that now he has to protect Sid and the baby because they are completely helpless. 

The main conflict for Diego is realizing that he needs to stay with Manny and the others because he needs the baby, but then he realizes he needs to stay because he cares about the insane mess. 

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Family

Manny’s family was taken away from him, he doesn’t have anything left. The humans hunted his mother and father and he doesn’t have any other mammoths around to bond with. His entire life is solitary and he has learned to live with that. 

Sid’s family abandons him on purpose, they don’t like him. The implication is that he is so annoying that they just leave him whenever they can and he is sad about it but plays it off as a complete joke. What else would he do? He can’t be sad about his own failing all the time because he’s the comedy relief!

Diego’s family is his pack, there is never an implication otherwise, he lives to serve his alpha and he would do anything, including attacking a seemingly innocent human and it’s child. 

The baby, the baby (who I remember has some sort of name but can not remember what that is) has a mother and a father. Manny and Sid only want to get the baby home. His mother dies protecting him, literally jumping over a waterfall, and his father chases a pack of sabertooth tigers in revenge. 

The herd/pack/family dynamic in the end becomes Sid, Manny, and Diego. They care about each other even though they all want to kill each other. It’s pretty beautiful what they form even if it is ridiculous. Coming from the broken world’s they all have they manage to make something work. 

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Meeting The Humans and the Sabers

So, we’re in the like pre modern human human phase here. No I can’t remember what they are cold, no I do not care. OK so, the sabertooth tigers are monitoring the humans to kill them all because half their pack was killed by the hunters. 

It actually isn’t completely insane, they’re predators and their family/pack was killed by other predators, they’re getting revenge. I don’t agree with their methods of coping, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. 

So the humans don’t talk the entire time, which makes them the “less intelligent” creatures in the movie, they seem to use tools and communicate with each other and they clearly fight against the animals, but the animals are the ones that talk. We relate to the things that can actually speak to us, so it’s an interesting choice to leave the humans voiceless. 

So the sabers are clearly the bad guys through the movie, but they do what the humans do, they kill. So it’s hard to make them out as more than just hungry lions to me. I know they’re villainous, but it must just be my love for big cats because I don’t have much to say about them. 

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Move Your Issues Off The Road

Manny’s first word’s are insults aimed at people who think he’s crazy. It seems about right. The character isn’t crazy, he just wants to be left alone. He thinks the only way to be happy is to be isolated. Of course this whole movie is him getting past that, but we open with some very obvious character explanation. 

We meet Sid next, he’s been abandoned as well, but he’s following the crowd instead of trying to be completely alone. He stumbles into the rhinos (or whatever they are) and ruins their food, and we get the first poop joke of the movie. It’s so obviously a kid’s movie in this moment, but that’s FINE, we can get past that. 

Carl and Frank, not our villains for long, but amusing side shoots. 

Manny having to save Sid just shows that he is clearly more than meets the eye. Manny doesn’t like animals that hunt other animals for sport. He doesn’t like hunting in general, after his entire family was wiped out by hunters he started to dislike hunting for pleasure. 

Also Manny playing the bluff card and Sid destroying it in seconds is pretty much the best way to sum up the movie. Manny does something intelligent, Sid just kind of screws it up. 

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Ice Age

Opening thoughts: Oh god the little squirrel bit, I almost managed to forget Scrat, but there he is. It’s not that I hate those bits, I just think they take up too much time in this movie. We could be doing SOMETHING ELSE, that’s all. 

Ok, so we open with Scrat (That’s his name right? Whatever, that’s what I think it is?) and he’s totally changing the environment, because that’s what he does. He causes these huge changes with just an acorn, which is either hilarious or pointless, fielder’s choice. 

I love this movie for a couple reasons, one being Manny, he’s just great. The voice acting is pretty typical, it’s not covering any new ground with that actor, but who cares? He is cynical and yet cares deeply for those that matter. 

Sid is just a sloth, just a weird main character with no purpose other than playing the heart and comic relief, which is to say he actually has a lot of purpose. Anyway, he doesn’t experience a lot of character growth, he is what he is, but it works for him. 

Diego is my favorite, he has the best character arc of all of them, even if it is a little rushed. He is what he needs to be in the movie, he was a bad guy and then he wasn’t that’s about it, but I love it anyway. 

The comedy is pretty standard in a kid’s film, the animation is OK, it’s nothing to write home about, but the story is sweet and the music is pretty great. 

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Final Thoughts

This is another great movie from my childhood. It’s the first Disney movie I am reviewing on this blog and it’s probably my second favorite (right after Lion King)

Ok, so Pocahontas emerging from the mist with the corn and even at that moment the men start to life their guns a little... That’s powerful all on its own because they still don’t get IT. 

Thomas telling her that the only way is for John to leave... My poor heart. When I was a kid I was so heartbroken! 

Powahatan giving John the cloak, that makes me so happy <3 I just want John to go back and fix everything forever between the English and the Natives... But we all know that doesn’t happen. 

The necklace being fixed by Meeko and Percy... That’s another great moment of animal sidekicks somehow being cute and useful. 

Then finally: “You must choose your own path.”

“I’m needed here.”

She knows who she is and what matters to her. She chooses her family over her love, she knows what she actually needs in life and even though it breaks her heart to watch him go... It’s the only way forward. 

We won’t even talk about the second movie, just this movie and the sadness it gives me EVERY TIME. 

The wind blowing around Pocahontas and we see it pushing the boat. Wow. 

And Pocahontas waving goodbye CALL BACK. Chills. Chills every time. 

Good stuff, good movie. Great music. It’s hardly a historical movie and like I said, this in NO WAY should be used as a guide to the Native Americans and English interactions. 

It can be used as a message for children, we need to find our compassion and treat those we meet as our equals, even if we do not understand them. 

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You’ll Have To Kill Me Too

Listen up.. You just met that dude. Not that I hate this.... In fact I love it. 

“This is the path I choose father. What will yours be?” 

The biggest question in this movie really. Her father realizes that even if they are different he doesn’t want to fight. 

“We have all come here with anger in our hearts. But she comes with courage and understanding.” 

EXACTLY. The only way forward is understanding and the courage to recognize difference as opportunity and not hate it immediately. 

Also when the Natives surrender and Radcliffe pulls a god damn Daenarys That shit is rude. 

That’s what I am calling it now. Whenever someone attacks after the other side has surrendered. I am calling it “Pulling a Daenarys.” FIGHT ME.