It seems as though every time Disney comes out with a new computer animated movie with a story for all ages, with a few adult jokes and spoofs thrown in for good measure, 20th Century Fox also has to release a computer animated film designed for the young and old alike. The computerized Disney film of this season was the cute, cuddly, and somewhat scary Monsters, Inc. Filled with all the elements that make a classic animated movie, including lovable characters and breathtaking computer graphics and animation. Ice Age was Dreamworks’ response.

Ice Age is the story of three misfit animals who, in their quest to survive the changes of weather coming with the impending ice age, find a human baby and feel obligated to return it to the human settlement in the north. The unlikely combination of a mammoth, a sloth and a saber-tooth tiger not only manage to return the baby to its father, but also realize the value of true friendship in the face of danger and hardship. The plot of the movie certainly gets five stars for its conformity to the established norm. A happy ending and, unlikely friendships and changes of heart by apparent villains define Ice Age as a family film.

Likewise, the graphics in the movie deserve a great deal of praise. DreamWorks is one of the few motion picture companies that can always be given credit for its stunning computer animation. Ice Age was definitely not an exception to this rule. The animals and humans in the movie moved with a natural quality and there was much attention paid to detail in the crafting of the characters and the landscape in which they moved. One of the most notable scenes in the movie is when the three creatures are sliding in and out of icy passageways at break-neck speeds. The computer graphics that carved out these ice slides were stunning.

Unfortunately for DreamWorks, besides its rather cliché plot and superb computer animation, Ice Age fell short of its previews. The previews mainly featured the antics of a creature described as a scrat — an animal somewhere between a squirrel and a rat — that was desperately trying to bury its acorn somewhere in the frozen landscape and always managing to bring trouble down on its head, including a highly amusing avalanche. Needless to say, the scrat was not one of the three main characters in the movie, and although it did appear about five times, including in the opening and closing sequences, its feature role in the previews was slightly misleading. The scenes with the scrat were much funnier than any involving the three major characters.

This is not to say that the rest of the movie wasn’t amusing. The audience found the disaster-stricken sloth and his antagonistic relationship with the mammoth hilarious. But the most appealing aspect of Ice Age seemed to be the never-ending quest of the scrat to bury his acorn.

On the whole, Ice Age exemplifies today’s typical family film. Attempts are made to teach some sort of moral lesson — in this case, that it is better to be friends with those who are different from us on the surface but are good inside than to be friends with those who are like us outwardly but are rotten deep down. This moral is encased in a slew of verbal jibes and childish Coyote and Roadrunner style violence intended to amuse the audience.

Although the movie is certainly of better quality than many of the children’s films that have been produced in the last few years, it still fails to live up to the anticipation of children and adults alike.