Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ice Age

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 03-15-2002, 09:55 PM:

03/15/2002, Regal Cinema World 8, Eugene OR, 4:45PM, #3, glorious 1.85

, digital sound (format unknown). Attendance about 125. Presentation would have rated "excellent" except for a little noticeable dirt in a couple places, one nasty lab splice, and the image was slightly jumpy (vertically). But overall it looked pretty darned good. Volume level was lower than normal, seemed barely adequate to me but OK. Only 90 mins. start to finish, including trailers & ads.

I liked it. The story flows nicely, it's kid-friendly, and the characters are very well done. Their mannerisms and expressions really bring them to life. Voices too. They did a great job with the CGI work, which of course is no surprise in animated films these days. This theater puts up a very bright, sharp image and I was paying close attention to things like apparent resolution of the CGI source material and what it might have looked like if projected digitally. In fact if not for the film quirks mentioned above, I could be easily convinced this is what DLP would look like (though I have not actually seen DLP so I may be full of on that).

Trailers included a flat/letterboxed version of the new Star Wars EP2 trailer. Seemed like it had more detail in it than Ice Age, really looked nice. Colors look like they are punched up though, more saturated than "normal" or something.

It's nice to see the computer system administrators who support the animators get mentioned in the credits. They specifically singled out several UNIX system admins and desktop support techs.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-19-2002, 07:35 PM:

Crowds for this are better than expected. We're already ahead of the first week of SHREK here. I'm surprised, since Fox has never been able to open animation well before. Good movie too! Nice and short.

Posted by Aaron Haney (Member # 747) on 03-19-2002, 08:45 PM:

David: I'll bet this movie was rendered at greater than 1280x1024 resolution, so DLP will actually show less detail than a film print, unless TI comes out with a new, higher-resolution chip.

By the way, there is an interesting comment over at kuro5hin.org by someone who worked on the film. The author gives some good details about their rendering process.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 03-20-2002, 02:27 PM:

Something I forgot to mention is that the sound mix uses a lot of dialog panning, so voices tend to follow the characters on the screen if they are off-center when speaking. This is done so seldomly in most movies that it stood out.

This seems to be a case of right movie, right time, smart marketing. The extended trailer they ran before the movie was released was excellent too.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 03-21-2002, 11:13 AM:

Attendance: 2002/03/21 19:00, Regal Madison Square 12, Huntsville, AL, Auditorium 8, DTS, Flat

After seeing more and more computer-generated animation, I wonder if it is becoming less and less special to me as I'm exposed to it more. Back in 1995, we all looked at "Toy Story" and were amazed. Now that many such movies have been made, I find myself, when watching them, to not pay as much attention to the computer animated eye candy (unless it's really good) and pay more attention to other aspects of the movies. I'd say that eventually, a movie will be made with beautiful realistic computer animation that will have a weak story, and will forever hurt people's opinions of such movies. Fortunately, "Ice Age" was not that movie.

"Ice Age" was a very enjoyable movie with a good story. The animation was well-done (except I thought the people looked quite unrealistic and strange) and there were many beautifully done scenes.

I purposely waited a few days after opening night so I wouldn't be in an auditorium full of noisy kids. The showings I chose had less than 20 people, and I never heard a single distracting noise the entire show. The wait was well worth it. The movie held my interest the entire time, and the presentation (image and sound) were near optimal.

Ice is a computer animator's dream. There are so many optical properites of ice that can be played with that the possibilities are pratically endless. Ice can be transparent or opaque, or even reflective if the lighting is right. Their adventure through the "short cut" through the ice was visually amazing. Part of it made me thing about the "travel through the wormhole" part of the movie "Contact".

Very highly recommendations!

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 03-21-2002, 12:12 PM:

Evans said: "I thought the people looked quite unrealistic and strange"

My initial reaction was the same, but since all the animal characters were very "stylized" in drawing style (the tigers for example with that cool jaw), it made sense that the humans were drawn similarly. They were stone-age characters so would look quite primitive anyway compared to modern man. I got used to them and sort of liked how they looked after a while...

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-21-2002, 10:11 PM:

I liked the film, but I will point out that expectations are important: neither the animation nor the script were quite up to the standards of, say, Monsters Inc. or Toy Story 2 (both of which are Disney/Pixar productions). I don't mean to say that the quality of the computer animation is "bad" (it isn't), but rather that it is "crude" in some ways. While some animated films (using either or both both computer- and cell-animation) have managed to use crudeness to good advantage (e.g. "Hercules"), this doesn't work quite as well here. Maybe we, as audiences, have just become spoiled with so much really great computer animation that anything less than bleeding-edge looks "crude." Oh,well...

Having said that, the story is fun (anot not just for kids!), the animation is generally good (particularly the facial expressions of the non-human characters), and the voices are great.

I've only seen this in 35mm, but will probably watch it in DLP sometime this weekend.... I did think that the 35mm print that I saw looked quite good.

Posted by Peter Berrett (Member # 672) on 03-22-2002, 06:22 PM:

Attendance Coburg Drive-in Friday 23 March 2002

Another animated Buddy/Road movie except this time the roads are icy.

As Joe Redifer said (from the Moulin Rouge thread)

quote:
Isn't it some sort of law that any movie, EVERY movie, with John Leguizamo will be horribly bad? I have not seen this movie, but every movie with John Leguizamo has always been horribly bad, no exceptions.

The mere prescence of his voice is obviously sufficient for Redifer's Law to hold true.

Look the animation was ok but I didn't find the storyline or characters all that appealling. The film is formulaic in many respects and I am tiring of wisecracking animated characters. Its an ok film to watch but just don't expect anything new.

I did get the feeling that the scenes featuring the little rodent and his nut were higher quality short animations put into a lower quality film to make it sell.

Verdict 6 1/2 stars out of 10

cheers Peter

Posted by Christopher Finn (Member # 938) on 03-23-2002, 12:36 AM:

I think John Lequizamo is just awesome!

Loved him here, in Summer of Sam, Moulin Rouge and as Ms. Chi-Chi Rodriguez in one of my all-time faves, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar! Makes an excellent drag princess.

"God grant me the ability to accept being a boy in a dress, the courage to change with the fashions and the wisdom to know the difference."

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 03-24-2002, 02:16 PM:

Scott said "I liked the film, but I will point out that expectations are important: neither the animation nor the script were quite up to the standards of, say, Monsters Inc. or Toy Story 2 (both of which are Disney/Pixar productions)."

Agreed. But I also wonder if the Disney/Pixar films sometimes aren't just a little too slick. Is it possible a mass audience will better identify with a movie that isn't trying quite so hard? Ice Age is a notch below those films in most ways, which might be a good thing, kind of differentiates it. I dunno, just a thought.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 04-12-2002, 04:08 PM:

Attendance: 2002/04/10 21:25, Regal Hollywood 18, Huntsville, AL, Auditorium 5

Five of my friends had not seen this movie, so they chose to see it and I tagged along. I had not intended on seeing it again, but really wanted to hang out with this group. I must say that I enjoyed the movie as much the second time as I did the first, and the entire group of friends (which comprised 75 percent of the audience (6 out of 8) loved it. It was definitely a winner with my friends. Just hearing their reactions to different things in the movie made it a lot of fun to watch. If you haven't seen this movie yet, by all means do so before it leaves theatres!

It's definitely more fun seeing this one with a group.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site