As of March 2022, we’ve officially welcomed two decades since the original release of the first Ice Age film, and what a long 20 years it’s been. If watching this with your children (or after an especially regressive adulthood) hasn’t driven you completely insane, don’t worry, because the latest sixth installment in the series was released in January 2022, with a seventh installment being currently worked upon by co-screenwriter Ray DeLaurentis, along with a new TV series from the franchise. That’s what you need right now — more animated possums. Because, as we all know, the fifth one was, like, so good. Coffins need multiple nails, after all.
Anyway, ahead of watching hordes of squabbling children punch and claw each other into the movie theater, here is a list of eight memorable Ice Age characters, ranked from worst to best. Though you may attempt to cut and run from the clutches of a once beloved, now Disney+ified children’s film classic, you can never escape. You can never break free. There. Will. Never. Be. Enough. Ice. Age.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
7 Roshan
20th Century Studios
Cursed. Godless. Absolutely repugnant. These are a few of the words capable of describing the “Ice Age Baby” known as Roshan, at least according to many. Nearly 30,000 people have signed Change.org petition to kill the unspeakable beast, and for good reason; what is that thing? First off, if one were to analyze the comparative sizes between this child and its temporary mammoth caretakers, the baby would be 6’10 and weigh a whopping 175 pounds — before it could even lift its neck, it could probably bench press you and your entire family. For seconds, just take a quick glance into its cold, soulless eyes. Nobody is saying that this baby intentionally caused the Ice Age itself, but if we’re ever serious about looking for a solution for global warming…
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
6 Manfred
Blue Sky Studios/ 20th Century Studios
Manny. Manfred. Man-crushing Mammoth. It’s hard being the main character and yet still being no one’s favorite; at least Sid the Sloth has a dedicated fanbase. While Manny doesn’t necessarily deserve to be hated, in part because he’s a good father and a good husband (at least in the context of complimenting his wife’s butt), and having the odd one-liner that’s a little funny, he just plays the role of the uptight “Straight Man” a little too well. This is a kid’s movie. You’re an animated Mammoth. You’re voiced by Ray Romano. This is all strange stuff; feel free to loosen up at any time, dude. We’re all stressed just looking at you.
5 Ellie
To be entirely fair to Ellie, she’s not that bad. Unlike the unfortunate curse of slim-thick squirrel Scratte, Ellie managed to mostly avoid the curse of being animated to suddenly have mammoth boobs (literally and metaphorically) in order to dissociate herself from Manny. However, despite the potential to be an interesting female character, she too often exists somewhere between annoying and boring.
As a mammoth who thinks she’s a possum, which is a pretty relatable experience for fellow women who have the misfortune of stumbling under the fluorescent lights of a high-street changing room, you’d think she’d have some degree of character development, but no, the female characters are usually goofy, warped, and strangely feminized versions of the male ones. Yes, we’re talking about you, hellish female sloth design; how will any human men know which animals are supposed to be women if they don’t look like juiced-up Jessica Rabbits?
4 Sid
Sid the Sloth — not the hero we wanted, and also probably not the hero we deserved. On first watching, it’s easy to hate Sid, as he fulfills the greatly undesirable role of Glacial Age Jar Jar Binks, but then you skip over the film series for a few years and start feeling bad about how ruthlessly the entire Twitter community cyberbullied him (and, by proxy, Benedict Cumberbatch).
Sid is the definition of “good-bad.” Sid is like listening to The Smiths, or reading literally anything by E.L. James — you can kind of enjoy it, providing you’re in the right (mildly comatose) headspace. After a little while, though, you might find yourself screaming, “It’s been two hours, how are you still this annoying?” (He and Morrissey have that in common). At the end of the day, you either love him or hate him, but most of the time you just hate him.
3 Diego
Diego’s a cool guy. He could even be considered a saber-toothed stud, which may be why, disturbingly, he seems to have amassed a large following of predominantly Gen-Z women who attribute him to their sexual awakenings — a much-needed win for digital animators everywhere. There’s not much negative to say about Diego. He’s morally good, he tries hard, he attempts to strangle Sid the Sloth almost as frequently as the viewer might like, and he is justifiably hydrophobic during the course of the unironically and unexpectedly terrifying second movie, where creepy Cretaceous alligator-lizard things reenact their version of a G-rated Jaws.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who actively disliked Diego (though, crucial note: if you are one of the seemingly innumerable people who are irresistibly attracted to him, please seek help, your family loves you).
2 Crash and Eddie
With two weird little opossum bodies and one shared brain cell, Crash and Eddie deserve all the love and spitballs in the Pleistocene world. In the entirety of their twenty-year lifespan, those little guys haven’t thought once. Not once. They just leap around, bungee jumping into volcanoes and entering into competitive street dancing competitions, trying to annoy everyone in their vicinity as much as possible. If anything, they fulfill the “annoying little brothers” gap within the Ice Age family, and, provided they’re not your annoying little brothers, they’re impossible to dislike.
1 Scrat
Scrat is a God. Scrat is stitched into the collective mind of every parent and child who managed to survive the animated hellscape that was the early 2000s. When you think of true determination, true willpower, true tenacity above all else, you don’t think of Gandhi. You don’t think of Columbus. There is only Scrat, with his bulbous eyeballs, certifiable acorn addiction, and mental foresight equivalent to a hyperactive toddler. In a perfect world, we would all learn a thing or two from that funky little rodent.
