On the harmless end, Sid the sloth exclaims “It’s a boy!” at the sight of a newborn, only to be told, “That’s a tail, Sid!” Then there’s a line from gonzo, swashbuckling weasel Buck (Simon Pegg of Star Trek), musing on the phrase “I’ve got your back”: “Why is it your back? Wouldn’t you rather they had your front? That’s where the good stuff is!” While crotch trauma humor is an unfortunate staple of family entertainment, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the first family cartoon I’ve seen with so much overt verbal humor about male organs - gags ranging from basically harmless to downright nasty.
“Don’t say that when you’re pressed up against me!” Take this exchange between Manny and Diego, huddled together in the maw of a giant carnivorous plant: Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), feeling left out of Manny and Ellie’s family togetherness, decides to hatch a clutch of dinosaur eggs he finds in an underground chamber that turns out to be connected to a subterranean lost world, which at least gives him something meaningful to do, and leads to some great set pieces in the lost world.Īlas, Dawn of the Dinosaurs also marks Blue Sky Studios’ descent into the kind of crude and suggestive humor they once left to DreamWorks.
Diego the sabretooth (Denis Leary) is worried that he’s lost his predator’s edge hanging around with herbivores - something so obvious the filmmakers should have thought of it last time instead of giving him some silly issue about fear of water. This time out, mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) are having a baby, a major step forward from Ellie thinking she was an opossum in the last film for no good comic or narrative reason. It’s probably better made than The Meltdown, with more workable plot ideas, fewer completely unintegrated sequences, better stuff to look at, and Blue Sky Studios’ best animation to date. Both sequels play less like bona fide movies than like initial brainstorming sessions for an Ice Age sequel, with every proposal thrown into a hat and then all put on the screen, without the bother of selecting, editing and rewriting, of exercising restraint, of shaping the material into a coherent whole.Īs a collection of parts, almost an anthology of ideas, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is fitfully entertaining. What both Ice Age sequels lack is discipline, somewhat as a Jackson Pollock drip painting lacks composition, perspective and negative space.
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