101. Ice Age

Title: Ice Age
Genre: Animation, Adventure, Comedy
Year: 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012

Summary:

Ice Age (2002): Sid, a sloth who never stops talking is left behind sleeping while everyone else begins the journey to the south. Awaking, he meets Manny, a mammoth who travels to the north, and decides to follow him. When a humans camp is attacked by tigers, a woman takes her baby and jumps into a river and falls off a waterfall. Before she disappears, the baby is rescued by Manny and Sid. The two animals decide to search for the father and return the baby to him. Diego, one of the tigers that attacked the humans, comes also claiming the baby.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006): Manny, Sid, and Diego are currently living in a large valley surrounded by an enormously high ice wall on all sides. When a water park begins to form, the trio discovers that the ice wall is actually a wall that is barely holding a massive body of water that could flood the valley to nearly a mile underwater. A vulture tells them that there is a boat at the other end of the valley that may save them all, but they only have 3 days to make it or die. Manny is having trouble facing the fact that he may be the last mammoth left. Along the way, they meet Ellie, a mammoth who thinks she is a possum, and her possum brothers Crash and Eddie. As they begin to travel together, Manny learns, with help from Diego and Sid, that having this new mammoth with them, may not be as bad as Manny makes it out to be while they try to escape the oncoming and continually threatening flood. During their journey, Scrat the sabre-toothed squirrel has his own adventures that eventually leads to something else entirely.

Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009): Life begins to change for Manny and his friends: Scrat is still on the hunt to hold onto his beloved acorn, while finding a possible romance in a female sabre-toothed squirrel named Scratte. Manny and Ellie, having since become an item, are expecting a baby, which leaves Manny anxious to ensure that everything is perfect for when his baby arrives. Diego is fed up with being treated like a house-cat and ponders the notion that he is becoming too laid-back. Sid becomes jealous of Manny and Ellie and begins to wish for a family of his own, and so steals some dinosaur eggs which leads to Sid ending up in a strange underground world where his herd must rescue him, while dodging dinosaurs and facing danger left and right, and meeting up with an insane one-eyed weasel known as Buck who hunts dinosaurs intently.

Ice Age 4: Continental Age (2012): One of filmdom's most beloved trios - "Ice Age's" Manny, Diego, and Sid - embark upon their greatest adventure after cataclysm sets an entire continental drift. Separated from the rest of the herd, they use an iceberg as a makeshift ship, which launches them on an epic seafaring quest. Manny and the gang are challenged like never before to become heroes and do the impossible, as they encounter exotic sea creatures, explore a brave new world, and battle ruthless pirates. And Scrat's reunion with his cursed nut catapults him to places no prehistoric squirrel has gone before.

Short Films:

Gone Nutty (2002): It begins with Scrat (Chris Wedge) returning to a huge tree, hollowed out and filled to the brim with acorns. There is one more empty spot in the middle of the acorns where Scrat tries to stuff the last acorn he brought with him (he first tries to slam it in like he did in the opening of the first film, but he seems to remember what would happen if he did, so he places it in gently instead). However it pops back out when his back is turned and after two more tries at getting it in place - both with the acorn popping out again - Scrat gets frustrated and stomps it into place, unwittingly blowing the entire tree, and every acorn along with Scrat is sent sliding down the side of a mountain. The acorns and Scrat go into free fall.

A short musical scene follows (to the tune of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Waltz), with Scrat collecting acorns as he falls, turning them into 3 things (a bed, a skyboard and a giant ball). Eventually Scrat collects and forms a 3-D sphere with the acorns, but then (with Scrat on top of it) it tilts upside down so Scrat and the acorns finally fall to the icy land down below. There is one lone acorn (presumably the one he was trying to stuff into the tree) left in the atmosphere. Scrat, stuck in the snow, is only able to free his arms before the acorn impacts right between his eyes, as fast as a meteorite. The extreme force results in continental drift, shaping the Earth's continents (probably Pangea) into their present day form and trapping Scrat on the original spot from the center of the impact. When Scrat digs out the acorn, he finds it has been charred and thus crumbled into ash. Disappointed and defeated, he puts on the remaining acorn cap as a hat.

No Time for Nuts (2006): Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel (a fictional animal from the Ice Age film series), while trying to find a place to hide his acorn, finds a buried time machine next to the ice-encased skeletal body of a human time traveler. He accidentally activates the machine, sending the acorn away. Scrat gets mad and tries to beat up the time machine and it sends him to the Middle Ages. Finding the acorn wedged under a rock, Scrat sees the Sword in the Stone and decides to use it as a lever to move the rock. He pulls out the sword but then finds himself under attack by a group of unseen archers, and uses the sword to block the arrows fired by the archers. He frees the acorn and takes it and the time machine and races off to find cover, only to hide in the barrel of a cannon. The cannon fires him into the path of hundreds of incoming arrows. The time machine teleports the acorn mid-flight and Scrat just barely manages to activate the machine again for himself.

He materializes in an arena in Ancient Rome. Scrat reaches for his acorn, but is dragged off when his tail is caught on a passing chariot pulled by a horse. Scrat manages to free himself just as a fanfare sounds. He thinks it is victory music introduces himself to the crowd like a triumphant gladiator, proudly holding up his acorn. Then he hears the growl of a lion coming from the tunnel behind him. He activates the time machine again, and lands on a field of ice. He is overjoyed, thinking he is home, but he soon learns he's really in 1912 when he sees the RMS Titanic heading straight towards him. The time machine is activated after impact, and Scrat finds himself in the first Ice Age movie, where he encounters himself and fights himself for his acorn. (Manny, Sid, Diego, and Roshan made a cameo watching the fight.) The acorn is teleported again, much to the distress of both Scrats.

The time traveling Scrat is sent to many dangerous situations where he would have been killed if he had not activated the time machine in time; firstly to the bottom of a launching rocket, Scrat desperately activates the time machine again, and is sent to a jewelery store, and is caught in red laser, and then he is sent to a girl's locker room where he is hit by a roller brush, and then he sent to the French Revolution where he appears under the falling blade of a guillotine, during Benjamin Franklin's famous kite flying experiment, in front of a wrecking ball, in front of Hiroshima, on the tracks in front of a speeding train, and in front of Michelangelo's David (this actually isn't a dangerous situation, but Scrat displays discomfort.). Frustrated, Scrat punches the machine, which sends him into a strange realm of floating timepieces. Scrat spots his acorn and grabs it, just before being drawn into a wormhole along with his acorn and the time machine.

The wormhole lands Scrat in front of an enormous oak tree. Overjoyed at the sight of so many acorns, he tosses away his time traveling acorn, which lands on and activates the time machine. Before it can fire again, Scrat smashes the time machine. Scrat attempts to remove the nuts from the tree, but soon discovers that it is only a sculpture, with a plaque on it reading "Here Stood the Last Oak Tree." Scrat realizes he's in the far future, where oak trees (and acorns) are extinct. He realizes that the acorn he brought with him is the only one real one around. He makes a dash for it, but the time machine manages to fire one last time, transporting the acorn right out of his paws right before the time machine collapsed into pieces. Stranded in the acorn-less future, Scrat lets out a scream of frustration, ending the film.

Then the lost acorn ends up floating behind the credits of the film.

Surviving Sid (2008): Sid, the Sloth, takes a school of children out on a camping trip from home, only to find that in typical Sid style, he is not a very good guide and the children he takes with him don't have a very good time. Scrat makes a small cameo appearance in the short, he has swallowed his nut and is struggling to keep it down, in true Scrat style he coughs it up and it is stolen from him. The camping trip leaves some of the children somewhat traumatized. Sid tries to pick a flower, but somehow this has led to a tree falling, which then hits a rock, which causes a chain reaction and hits a series of larger rocks, until eventually hitting a large iceberg. The iceberg then carves out a u-shaped valley, which Sid later names the Grand Canyon. Afterwards the kids get so annoyed with Sid that it ends with them tying him up. At the end of the short movie (20,000 years later in the present day) it shows a father and son beaver looking over the Grand Canyon with the son asking who made it. The father replies "Nature or a being with infinite wisdom."

Scrat's Continental Crack-up Part 1 (2010): Scrat sniffs an ice cap looking for a place where his acorn would be safe. When Scrat hits the ice it starts to crack, causing him to quickly push ice into the hole to prevent trouble. When Scrat merely touches the ice with the tip of his acorn, it somehow ends up breaking the entire mountain below the ice cap. Scrat gets his acorn and falls into the rift, passing by the weasel Buck mounting his dinosaur nemesis Rudy while he goes, and ends passing through all of Earth's layers, eventually arriving at a hovering, metallic sphere which composes the inner core. While pursuing his acorn, Scrat makes the core spin and breaks Pangea into the contemporary continents, Australia is shown forming, giraffes are created when Africa is separated from Pangea, which stretches their necks , and making the boot-shaped Italian Peninsula kick a nearby island (accompanied by a scream of "GOAL!") during its formation. Scrat eventually trips and starts bumping between the sphere and the solid outer core, creating a Scrat-like Moai, a Scrat Sphinx which loses its nose, and four Scrat faces on Mount Rushmore. Scrat later picks up balance up and grabs his acorn, and ends up spinning in the core until he's thrown out of the rift into the upper atmosphere. While falling, Scrat positions his body as if he would fall into the sea, but ends up landing on a piece of ice, which breaks separating Scrat from his acorn as he lets off another scream of frustration.

Scrat's Continental Crack-up Part 2 (2011): Scrat is riding an iceberg, when he sees an island. He climbs on to the island, where he sees a skeleton. He examines it and realizes it is pointing to a nut under the sea. Scrat uses a large stone to weigh him down the nut. When he pulls out the nut, it reveals to be a map to a giant pile of acorns. Scrat, excited with his find, encounters a swordfish skeleton. The skeleton pulls Scrat up to a pirate ship, where he encounters some pirates including a Gigantopithecus, a boar, a rabbit, a kangaroo, a blue-footed booby, an elephant seal, and a female saber-toothed tiger. The pirates make Scrat dance alongside a tied up Manny, Sid, and Diego.

Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (2011): In the middle of decorating for the holiday season, Sid accidentally destroys Manny's favourite decorations. Sid, convinced by Manny that he is now on the Santa's naughty list, takes off with Crash, Eddie and Peaches for the North Pole to get back on the Santa's good side. When on the North Pole, Sid and his crew accidentally destroy Santa's Workshop. When Manny, Ellie and Diego worried over Peaches safety, arrive to North Pole, they must come together and save Christmas.