As if it isn't hard enough to be an elementary school teacher, it must be extra tough when an Ice Age movie comes out, and they have to try and teach the young 'uns that the "science" involved in these animated adventures is as wrong as wrong can be.
As in, saber-tooth tigers and woolly mammoths didn't live at the same time as humans, so they couldn't save a baby in the first Ice Age flick. And that if Diego, Sid and Marty were all around for the beginning of the ice age, they'd be over 10,000 years old in Ice Age: The Meltdown. Now, teachers everywhere get to wearily explain that no, dinosaurs didn't survive the ice age by living underground.
In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the unlikely team of Marty the Mammoth (Ray Romano), Diego the Saber-Tooth (Denis Leary), Marty's mammoth wife Eliie (Queen Latifah) and a few straggling others set off to search for Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) after he finds a few dinosaur eggs and gets dragged into an subterranean dino-Xanadu by an angry mama T-Rex. The expected challenges and comic moments ensue like clockwork.
This third Ice Age outing isn't bad, though. In fact, the 3-D animation is some of the best so far, due to director Carlos Saldanha's canny understanding of when to enhance a scene with three-dimensional gimcrackery, and when to hold back. The entire film is a gorgeous visual feast, even when the script bogs down a bit.
Also excellent: Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) as a quite mad weasel named Buck, who's been living in the dinosaur world for some time and serves as a crazed guide on the search for Sid. And fans of Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel, will be pleased at the amount of screen time he gets in a secondary storyline, as his endless search for an acorn brings him into a fierce love-hate relationship with a scrappy lady squirrel.
While any new animated feature will suffer by comparison to Pixar, the folks at DreamWorks have built a solid franchise with Ice Age, and this Dawn of the Dinosaurs is better than than the less-than-impressive Meltdown. It's also a movie that -- especially for smaller children -- is highly entertaining even without the extra expense of 3-D presentation, so parents can confidently buy tickets to the less expensive 2-D showings and know that the kids will still have a good time.