Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild

The cinematographic saga Ice Age has never ceased to delight us and to offer us an endearing prehistoric universe by proposing to follow the adventures of a group of mammals having survived the Paleolithic ice age. The central characters of the first film, Manny (a mammoth), Sid (a sloth), Diego (a saber-toothed tiger) and the squirrel Scrat, were joined in the second film by Ellie (a mammoth) and her two adopted brothers Crash and Eddie (two oppossum brothers), thus increasing the number of main characters even further. All five films were successful worldwide (Ice Age (2002), Ice Age 2: The Meldown (2006), Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Ice Age 4: Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) and Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) and were supplemented by numerous short films, specials, video games and merchandise). Unfortunately, the takeover by The Walt Disney Company of 21st Century Fox and its subsidiaries signaled the end of Blue Sky Studios Inc, the animation studios that created this universe. The franchise had generated more than six billion in revenue.

The sixth film of the Ice Age saga is the only one not to have been conceived by Blue Sky Studios Inc. but by a new studio, Bardel Entertainment, and it must be admitted that the quality of this new animated film does not manage to equal those of the previous films and that the story proves to be too simplistic and lacking the creative genius of Blue Sky Studios Inc. However, far from being an artistic failure, the result is an animated film with an attractive visual quality and we can see with pleasure our favorite characters Manny, Sid, Diego and the others, but as simple secondary characters. It is thus the two opposums Crash and Eddie and Buck Wild (appeared the first time in the third film) who become the main characters. We will also regret the absence of the squirrel Scrat. In the same way the actor Simon Pegg is the only original voice present in the previous films to come back in this one to our great sadness.

Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild marks the return of the craziest prehistoric universe in cinema six years after the last film. The possum brothers Crash and Eddie, eager for all kinds of thrills, want to be independent and decide to leave the company they are part of to live their own adventures. However, due to bad luck, they find themselves trapped in an underground cave where they will meet Buck Wild but also have to face a new enemy thirsting for conquest. Crash, Eddie and Buck Wild will have to do something unique to save this lost world from the domination of some dinosaurs.

Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild doesn't have the same colossal budget to reach the level of the previous films in terms of animation but we find with a certain pleasure the characters we grew up with and who marked our collective memory. However, we would have preferred the action to focus on the main characters and not on the secondary ones. This change of orientation makes us feel more like we are facing a spin-off rather than a real sequel to the previous films. In the same way, the change of scriptwriters, notably the absence of Michael Berg, is felt concretely by an absence of a grain of madness that was the strength of the previous films.

This film seems to have been conceived from the beginning for a release on Disney+ and not in theaters, and we find ourselves with a film that is clearly intended for a young audience rather than for an audience of any age. In the same way, the too short duration of the film does not do it any favors and the lack of development of the characters and a story that is watched without any real desire brings a real disappointment. While Disney + has accustomed us until now to ambitious films, movies coming out of the current context directly on this streaming platform without going through the cinema, Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild proves to be a disappointment and cruelly lacks the artistic genius of Chris Wedge. 

Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild 
Directed by John C. Donkin
Produced by Denise L Rottina
Written by William Schifrin, Ray De Laurentis 
Starring Simon Pegg, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Justina Machado, Vincent Tong, Aaron Harris, Ray Romano, Queen Latifah, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary
Music by Batu Sener 
Production companies : 20th Century Studios, Blu Sky Studios, 20th Century Fox Animation
Distributed by Disney +
Release date : January 28, 2022 (United States), March 25, 2022 (France)
Running time : 82 minutes

Seen on January 28, 2022 on Disney +

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