Ice Age is a feature-length computer-animated film created by Blue Sky Studios and released by 20th Century Fox in 2002. It was directed by Carlos Saldanha and Chris Wedge from a story by Michael J. Wilson. Its sequels are called Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) and Ice Age 3 (2009).

Ice Age was rated PG by the MPAA.

The characters are all prehistoric animals with the exception of some early humans (who bear some Neanderthal-like facial features, yet are not shown conversing, only grunting or yelling, and possess technology that is much more sophisticated). The animals can talk to and understand each other and are voiced by a variety of famous actors. What can also be noted is that, like many films of prehistoric life, the rules of time periods apply very loosely, as many of the species shown in the film never actually lived in the same areas, let alone the same time periods.

• Manfred aka Manny (Mammoth) - Ray Romano
• Sid (ground sloth) - John Leguizamo
• Diego (Smilodon) - Denis Leary
• Soto (Smilodon) - Goran Visnjic
• Zeke (Smilodon) - Jack Black
• Oscar (Smilodon) - Diedrich Bader
• Lenny (Smilodon) - Alan Tudyk
• Scrat (Saber-toothed squirrel) - Chris Wedge
• Carl (Brontops) - Cedric the Entertainer
• Frank (Brontops) - Stephen Root
• Rachel (Female ground sloth) - Jane Krakowski
• Jennifer (Female ground sloth) - Lorri Bagley

See also List of characters in the Ice Age films

The film begins with a the very wary saber-toothed squirrel called Scrat, who is shown trying to find a location to find his prized possession his acorn. He finds a place in the ice and tries to pack it down into the ice. The ice begins to crack, it starts off as a very small crack but it grows and grows and grows until it eventually reaches the very top of a glacier. The glacier starts to fall over and follow Scrat. He runs away but another glacier in the opposite direction starts heading towards him too. Scrat just manages to escape the two glaciers.

Meanwhile most animals are trying to avoid the ice age by migrating south to a warmer climate. Sid, a clumsy ground sloth left behind by his family during the migration, is attacked by two Brontotherium whom he angered by soiling their salad with glyptodont dung, flicking flecks of the dung at their face, insulting their intelligences, and eating their dandelion. Sid is soon saved by Manfred ("Manny"), one of the last remaining mammoths who fights off the two brontotheres. Not wanting to be alone and unprotected, Sid follows Manny, much to the mammoth's annoyance.

Soto, the leader of the Smilodon wants revenge on a group of human hunter-gatherers by eating the chief Runar's baby boy, Roshan, because the humans had wiped out half of his pack of Smilodon for food and clothing. During the attack by the Smilodon pack (Soto, Diego, Zeke, Lenny and Oscar) on the humans, Nadia (Runar's wife and Roshan's mother) evades the cats who are pursuing her by jumping into a raging river with her baby. Enraged at having lost the baby in their attack, Soto orders Diego to find the baby and bring it to him alive.

Sid and Manny spot Nadia near the lake having survived her brave escape. She manages to place the infant on an embankment before being swept by the current. After much persuasion by the sloth, they decide to return Roshan to his tribe. However, when they get to the human camp, the humans have already left. Diego, still trying to snatch the baby, convinces the pair that he knows where the humans are going and offers his services as a tracker and a guide, which Manny accepts.

The trio take Roshan (or "Pinky" as they often refer to him) across an assortment of different terrains and into several comedic and pertinent situations. These include an army of dodos trying to escape extinction by eating watermelons, the trio venturing into a series of ice caves where they discover all sorts of odd things including a frozen Tyrannosaurus Rex and even a UFO, and a cave with human drawings of animals. However Diego is found by Zeke and Oscar who tell him of Soto's impatience; but Diego tells them that he is also bringing Manny and Sid to the Smilodon lair. In the end, Diego learns that it is wrong to harm a child and helps Manny and Sid bring the baby back to his father. We also learn that Manny does not trust humans as they killed his wife and child.

At the end of the film, Diego, Manny and Sid battle Soto's pack. First, Sid lures them away by skiing, then tricks them with a fake baby. Manny then knocks them out with a log. As Sid goes to retrieve Roshan, Zeke follows him. But he fails to surprise them and Sid jumps on him, getting him stuck in the hollow where Roshan hid. The battle ends with Manny trapped against the canyon wall. As the pack close in for the kill, Diego leaps in front of them and fights against Soto. The fight is short and Soto easily knocks Diego against the rocks, knocking him out. As Soto closes in for the kill on Manny, and leaps towards the mammoth, with his sharp teeth extended, Diego, using his last ounce of strength leaps between Soto and Manny. Diego falls to the ground and lies very still. Manny, angered by Diego's apparent murder, knocks Soto into the canyon wall, causing icicles from the ridge to fall. Soto looks up to see the icicles falling towards him and takes one last look of horror before being impaled and subsequently killed. After seeing what happened to Soto, Oscar and Lenny run off in fear. Manny and Sid manage to return Roshan to Runar and his tribe, and Diego, who had survived Soto's assault (since cats have 9 lives, as he wryly put it), rejoins them as the group begin heading off to escape the Ice Age and move on to the South.

Alert viewers will notice the plot has some similarity to Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book (1967), though it also has a lot of themes and jokes from Three Men and a Baby. During a speech given at the Tokyo Film Festival in 2006, producer Bill Mechanic stated, "I had been at Disney, we had success with Three Men and I thought we had picked the ice age as a good milieu, and then what story could we tell in there? And I thought the way to do it was Three Men and a Baby."^{[citation needed]}

Originally, Sid was trying to avoid another sloth named Sylvia. He manages to lose her by putting her in the path of some migrating glyptodons, who unknowingly carried her off when she got caught on their backs, and again by making it look like Diego had killed him, but she saw he was faking, so she deserted him in anger. This segment was still used in the movie, but was used for Sid to avoid the two brontotheres who were still after him, as they fell for the trick. It was kept in the storybook version, however. You can watch the deleted scenes separately, or in Nutty Movie Mode, both of which are included on Disc 1 of the two-disc Special Edition DVD.

There is also a subplot where an animal named Scrat makes many comical attempts to bury his beloved acorn. His misfortunes include getting chased by an enormous glacier, being struck by lightning, attempting to thaw out the acorn by a fire too long so that it accidentally took the form of a kernel of popcorn, and finally getting cryonically frozen in an ice cube along with his much sought after nut. 20,000 years into the future, the ice cube washes up on the shore of an island. The sun slowly melts the cube, thawing Scrat and the ice surrounding his acorn, which is barely out of reach, and ends up being removed from the ice cube by the tide. Scrat then explodes out of the ice cube in anger and hits his head repetitively on a tree, which drops a coconut. Scrat's anger immediately turns to glee at this new find. He tries to pack it into the ground as he did previously with his acorns, but in the process causes a volcanic eruption.

Scrat is known to be similar to the prehistoric animal Leptictidium.

Scrat also got his own short film entitled Gone Nutty, where he loses his meticulously-organized collection of acorns in a catastrophic chain of events occurring after ramming his acorn into the hole in the exact middle of the collection. He remains with one which is reduced to an ashen crisp after it went crashing down on him with an impact like a missile.

• Ice Age: The Meltdown was released on March 31, 2006
• Ice Age 3 is set to be released on July 1, 2009

• List of characters in the Ice Age films
• List of animated feature-length films
• List of computer-animated films

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