Ice Age: Blue Sky's Answer to Shrek?

[D'Snowth]

As long as we're discussing advances in CGI animation, why is literally nobody but me even talking about how cheap and lazy the CGI for the new Tom and Jerry movie looks?

 

[Muppet Master]

Yeah, it doesn't look very good at all. I'm also not much of a fan of animation/live-action hybrid films. It can work if made correctly but it usually ends up falling flat and looking super awkward.

 

[CoolGuy1013]

Well, it looks like even though Blue Sky has shut down, Disney is still continuing the Ice Age franchise. Movie 6 (focusing on Buck Wild) comes out Friday the 28th, there’s a seventh movie in production, and they’re even working on a Rio 3.

This should be a nice-ish consolation for those saddened by the studio’s closure (although a confusing one; if the franchise was gonna continue anyway, why shut down the studio in the first place?), but now it seems to me that nothing can kill Ice Age, much to my dismay…

 

[D'Snowth]

Because that's what Disney does: buy up other studios to shut them down to eliminate the competition.

 

[CoolGuy1013]

Well, you’ve got a point there.

 

[Muppet Master]

The animation of this new Ice Age somehow looks worse than the original from 2002 even though it's coming from a billion-dollar company. I really thought Ice Age 5 would be the end but they really can't stop milking it. The worst part is that this one doesn't even seem to feature Scrat the squirrel. Even as the quality of the movies declined, his bits remained entertaining and now we don't even have that.

 

[D'Snowth]

The animation of this new Ice Age somehow looks worse than the original from 2002 even though it's coming from a billion-dollar company.

I just saw a promo for it, and I have to agree, up until I saw the main characters, I felt like I was watching the trailer of some off-brand CGI movie from the early 2000s, that totally took me by surprise.

Then again, the Ice Age franchise has been an interesting condundrum, if you ask me. The overall animation has improved over the sequels, yes, but, I would argue that the character designs have declined since the first movie; just take a look at these glyptodons from the first movie compared to how they looked in the sequels.

 

[Oscarfan]

The animation of this new Ice Age somehow looks worse than the original from 2002 even though it's coming from a billion-dollar company. I really thought Ice Age 5 would be the end but they really can't stop milking it. The worst part is that this one doesn't even seem to feature Scrat the squirrel. Even as the quality of the movies declined, his bits remained entertaining and now we don't even have that.

I thought it was going to be a TV show, which explained the crappy animation. But I can't believe they're actually putting that out and calling it a "movie."

 

[Muppet Master]

I just saw a promo for it, and I have to agree, up until I saw the main characters, I felt like I was watching the trailer of some off-brand CGI movie from the early 2000s, that totally took me by surprise.

Then again, the Ice Age franchise has been an interesting condundrum, if you ask me. The overall animation has improved over the sequels, yes, but, I would argue that the character designs have declined since the first movie; just take a look at these glyptodons from the first movie compared to how they looked in the sequels.

You could argue the designs declined but they probably just wanted to make the character look less threatening and more colorful so they could appeal to a larger audience of kids. At the time, it seemed like Blue Sky was going to be a serious threat to Dreamworks and Pixar but they sadly never amounted to much, even before Disney shut them down.

I thought it was going to be a TV show, which explained the crappy animation. But I can't believe they're actually putting that out and calling it a "movie."

That's what I thought as well. Even then, it looks even worse than other TV shows based on animated franchises like the Kung Fu Panda series and the Penguins of Madagascar show. Some of the graphics looked like video-game quality animation.

 

[D'Snowth]

You could argue the designs declined but they probably just wanted to make the character look less threatening and more colorful so they could appeal to a larger audience of kids.

I have considered that as a possibility, and not just that, but when you think about it, the first movie actually seems dark and edgy compared to the sequels . . . though, that's not exactly saying much; the first movie was certainly light-hearted and quirky in its own way, but it just seems like the sequels put far more emphasis on that aspect . . . though, as I've mentioned before, this also leads itself to another problem I've had with the movies: these are rather quirky movies, and while David Newman's score for the first movie was very, very fitting, John Powell's far more grand and cinematic scoring for the sequels were not a very good fit at all. Even though I never bothered to see the fifth movie, seeing that they brought in John Debney to score that one, I would hope he would've been a far more fitting choice, considering this is the same composer who scored movies like ELMO IN GROUCHLAND and ELF - the latter of which he even said he had intentionally given that movie a score with an offbeat, left-of-center sound with a little bit of an edge to it to match the overall mood and feeling of the movie, hence the use of "weirder" instruments throughout the score . . . and it really worked to the film's advantage. If you ask me, the score can make or break a movie.

At the time, it seemed like Blue Sky was going to be a serious threat to Dreamworks and Pixar but they sadly never amounted to much, even before Disney shut them down.

Let's be honest though . . . ICE AGE aside, Blue Sky's outings have been rather forgettable. I know they tried franchising RIO as well, but, I don't know, it didn't seem to have the kind of universal appeal to warrant franchising. Otherwise, I still contend that their version of HORTON HEARS A WHO! was only popular for JoJo the token emo teen. THE PEANUTS MOVIE was certainly very respectful to the works of Schulz, and I'm glad that they opted to not franchise that one like 20th Century Fox was wanting to do.