Ice Age

I find the critical and audience reaction to Ice Age depressing. It's been damned with faint praise or written off as Fox's attempt to steal a piece of box-office cheese off the plates of the two cartoon titans, DreamWorks and Disney. Yet I loved this movie and can't wait to see it again; maybe I'll take my daughter, who's just shy of five and adored it, and maybe not. No, it's not a modern classic on the order of the Toy Story movies, or a hip, half-satirical reimagining of fairytales like Shrek. Yet when you look back over the whole movie, and consider how many contrasting emotions it conjures, and how expertly it entertains elementary school-age children, it ought to be considered a triumph. The filmmakers have taken a simple, even cliche story (a mammoth, a sloth and a tiger escort a seemingly orphaned human infant to be reunited with his surviving parent) and staged it with tremendous panache.

Codirected by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, it's a big, bright comic epic, modeled equally on slapstick shorts by Chuck Jones (especially the Road Runner series) and those lean 1950s westerns in which a tiny band of mismatched, squabbling wanderers undertake a perilous journey through lovely but savage terrain. (They were usually directed by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher.) It's no accident that I've invoked genres that hit the peak of their popularity a half-century ago. Despite screamingly funny slapstick sequences and deliberately anachronistic verbal riffs by its two-dimensional stars (Ray Romano's woolly mammoth, John Leguizamo's sloth, Denis Leary's saber-toothed tiger), Ice Age is a pretty square piece of entertainment. But here, as in great old Hollywood movies, the squareness lies in the tale, not the telling. Ice Age starts with one of the finest chain-reaction slapstick setpieces I've seen outside of a Spielberg movie: a frenetic little rodent skitters all over a snowy, craggy panorama, desperately trying to bury a nut in the ice-slicked earth. When he finally achieves his goal, lightning-bolt cracks zigzag across the land every direction, ripping up a mountainside and causing an avalanche that unleashes twin glaciers. (The wordless, poker-faced, "Oh, no" closeup of the rodent when he hears the awful rumble is pure Wile E. Coyote.) A rogues' gallery of early mammals migrates to escape the chaos; its ranks include the mammoth, Manfred, a strong, cranky loner, and the sloth, Sid, a lisping little hustler who's fearful and lazy, and defends both personality traits as perfectly reasonable responses to nature's viciousness. The character is weird, abrasive, charming and inexplicably believable, as if W.C. Fields played a comic imp in a Kurosawa movie. (Leguizamo holds the distinction of being the only voice actor in the cast of the otherwise wretched Titan A.E. who bothered to give a fully rounded, fully felt performance; if he wanted, he could become the Peter Sellers of cartoons.)

In time, the mammoth and the sloth acquire the aforementioned cute li'l baby, whose mother died trying to save him after saber-toothed tigers decimated their village. The softhearted Manfred and the jovial goofball Sid want to reunite the child with his father, who's tracking the tigers back to their hideout. The only creature who can guide them to the rendezvous in time is another tiger, Diego (Leary), who pretends to be on their side. He actually has a secret agenda: his boss, Soto (Goran Visnjic), wants the baby as a ritual snack, as revenge against tiger-killing humans?and he aims to kill himself a mammoth in the process. (This is a familiar, nearly fool-proof western trope: Diego's reminiscent of a cynical Native American scout, torn between loyalty to the tribe and his slowly dawning empathy for the settlers he's serving up.) Turns out Manfred the mammoth also lost his family to hunters; the horrific event is depicted in a dazzling scene where the mammoth stares at cave paintings depicting a mammoth hunt, and the crude drawings become animated, giving us the gist of what happened. (It's like the scene in Prince of Egypt where the slaughter of first-born slaves is recreated in a living fresco.)

Such descriptions suggest a grim movie, but Ice Age is basically a comedy, and a knockabout comedy at that. But considering the heartfelt writing and direction in the emotional scenes, I think it's cheap and cynical to dismiss them as mere sops to cartoon convention. In his Times review, Elvis Mitchell wrote that the film "falters?in its adherence to the Disney philosophy of required poignancy." I don't think poignancy is ever required, but in children's films, it's desirable, even preferable. A kiddie cartoon that doesn't risk sentiment remains a kiddie cartoon; a cartoon that reaches for sentiment (or irony, or empathy) dares to be a fable?ultimately a much grander, more meaningful art form. (Whether I like Warner Bros. or Disney better depends on what kind of mood I'm in that day, but if you ask me which animation outfit produced greater and more transformative works of popular art, I'd have to say Disney.)

Don't let the chilly reception of Ice Age scare you off; it's a warmhearted movie, more evolved than its notices might suggest.

Framed

Sister act: Pauline and Paulette continues the lamentable tradition of presenting retarded characters mainly as vehicles by which so-called "normal" characters can grow and change, or have their already obvious goodness (and the audience's decency) confirmed. This French-Dutch feature about a mentally challenged woman living with her sister, an opera buff, isn't unwatchable. The performances and Michel van Laer's melancholy pastel photography keep you watching, and I liked the pacing of the movie; it's more meditative than I expected, and droll humor comes from close observation of characters (and performances). But if you look past the technique, director-cowriter Lieven Debrauwer still seems to be milking the situation rather than developing it. The same situation seems to replay itself over and over: retarded sister Pauline (Dora van der Groen) misinterprets a situation, or gets myopically locked into a single obsessive thought, and gets into big, big trouble?whereupon caretaker sister Martha (Julienne De Bruyn) saves the day or at least tries to clean up the mess.

I appreciated the realistic texture of the sisters' relationship (Paulette resents Pauline at the same time that she loves and treasures her). But the sitcom-like premise that starts the story is an eye-roller (there are four sisters total?one of whom, Pauline's caretaker, dies, leaving a will stating that the surviving sisters will only get their inheritance if one of them agrees to take in Pauline). And the eye-poppingly colorful production design strikes me as a big mistake; it might have been fun for the filmmakers and the crew, but it works against the fairly realistic performances, suggesting a Technicolor fantasy musical that never was. I think movies should look good, but not if the look works at cross-purposes with the script.

?

Battle zone: Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, now playing at Two Boots Pioneer Theater, is a lengthy (165 minutes), intermittently fascinating documentary that calls into question many of the central assumptions of that conflict: that the Serbs mass-raped Bosnian women, that the Serb massacre of Muslim civilians in Bosnia might not have taken place, that the NATO forces were the real war criminals. Unfortunately, aside from contrarian but unverifiable numbers by the Red Cross and other nonprofits, too many of director George Bogdanich's counterassertions are introduced as questions ("Could it be that??") and when you put them all together, they have the tinny ring of countermyth. I'm all for questioning received wisdom, and I'm on record opposing the Hollywood cliche of Serbs as Nazi Terminators (see the loathsome fake-serious war movie Behind Enemy Lines). But much of this film veers perilously close to The-Holocaust-Never-Happened/The-CIA Bombed-the-Twin-Towers territory?propaganda in documentary drag.