Pity poor Ice Age. If it hadn't been released so close to the excellent Monsters, Inc, it may have avoided excessive scrutiny. But with the Pixar hit illustrating how good computer animation can be, this similarly created adventure isn't so much cool as downright tepid. Much of this is due to the plot, in which a moody mammoth, a slow-thinking sloth and a sinister sabre-toothed tiger team up during the Pleistocene era to return a lost human infant to his parents. It's wittily scripted with plenty of banter between the lead characters, voiced by John Leguizamo and Denis Leary among others. But there's insufficient action and excitement to carry such a basic tale while having a snow-covered environment to look at doesn't help either. The style of the animation is equally hard to warm to - the boxy, sharp-edges and coldness may be fitting given the sub-zero setting, but children (and adults too) seem to respond best to a certain amount of cuteness that Ice Age sadly lacks. Overall, this is adequate, but instantly forgettable.

Manny the mammoth, Sid the loquacious sloth, and Diego the sabre-toothed tiger go on a comical quest to return a human baby back to his father, across a world on the brink of an ice age.