Children of the 1990s and early 2000s may fondly recall that Disney produced a series of cheap direct-to-video sequels to its animated classics both new and old. This practice was eventually discontinued not because it was unprofitable but because it was seen as potentially damaging to the studio’s sterling reputation. In the streaming era, however, the aesthetic of direct-to-video movies and Saturday morning spinoff series has been reclaimed and rebranded. The Ice Age Adventures Of Buck Wild, a tablet-thin sixth entry in the long-running prehistoric cartoon franchise, is now premium content. The premium is the monthly Disney+ subscription fee. The content, here, is pitiable garbage.
Pitiable, to be clear, because stripping second-tier 20th Century Fox franchises for parts seems like a sad job for the animators hired to bring about this Ice Age. The earlier five movies were produced by Blue Sky, an animation studio with plenty of hits (albeit not many especially good movies) to their name. After Disney acquired Fox and its subsidiaries, they unceremoniously shuttered Blue Sky, and outsourced the new spinoff-y sequel.
To their credit, the core voice cast have opted out of scab Ice Age. Ray Romano (mammoth Manny), Queen Latifah (Manny’s wife Ellie), John Leguizamo (sloth Sid), and Denis Leary (saber-tooth tiger Diego) are nowhere to be found. Their characters, however, remain on the margins of the story, now voiced by new actors. The movie understands that small children will be confused if they don’t get at least a little marital complaining from a woolly mammoth who at least sounds somewhat like Ray Romano. (Sean Kenin Elias-Reyes does a credible imitation.)
The sole returning big name is Simon Pegg, who plays the movie’s namesake, one-eyed weasel Buck Wild. He’s joined at the center by Crash (Vincent Tong) and Eddie (Aaron Harris), the chattering possums who are also adopted brothers of Ellie (Dominique Jennings). There are notes of ’90s extreme-itude to these comic-relief side characters given their own adventure—though the story belongs more to Crash and Eddie than to Buck, who has been considerably tamed from the swashbuckling madness of his previous appearances.
Crash and Eddie reunite with their hero Buck after seeking independence from the quasi-mothering of their sister and stumbling back into the underground lost world of dinosaurs first introduced in Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs. Buck and a Strong Female Character called Zee (Justina Machado) are facing an insurgency from a brainy dino named Orson (Utkarsh Ambudkar), who believes that his intellectual superiority entitles him to rule over everyone else. The rest of the herd trundles behind their friends and eventually joins the fight. None of this is treated with much urgency—though there is some shameless sentimentality involving Ellie and her brothers at the tail end.
Like the recent Diary Of A Wimpy Kid reboot, this movie was first developed as a potential TV series, and has been reshaped into something resembling an extended pilot. Nonetheless, at this point, big-studio TV animation should look less choppy than Buck Wild. The way some reasonably well-textured CG fur wraps around flat bodies makes the whole thing look more like a millennia-earlier Nut Job prequel than an Ice Age feature.
Those earlier Ice Ages may not have been laugh riots, but they could at least rely on the zippy momentum of visual gags. If anything, the animation here interferes with the comedy. To cite a micro example: At one point, the characters munch on what look like mushrooms, referring to them as marshmallows. Is this a weak joke, or just terrible rendering of a dumb anachronism? Even worse for its cartoon bona fides, the series’ best and purest character, Scrat—the sad-eyed little mammal who lives in endless desperate pursuit of a single acorn—is missing in action. Perhaps his antics involve a precision of movement and output of energy that goes beyond this sorta-movie’s budget. (Then again, he spent most of the last movie in outer space, so it’s entirely possible that the poor bastard has run out of oxygen.)
In short, it’s hard to imagine anyone outside of the single-digit age range having much fun with such an aimless adventure. Readers might reasonably ask whether it’s really such a big deal that Disney made a kid-friendly, streaming-only follow-up to a bunch of other kid movies. But it’s the extreme age-specificity and seeming low effort of Buck Wild that makes it more content than feature film. Sometimes TV shows get dinged for offering a so-called “filler episode.” The Ice Age Adventures Of Buck Wild trains kids to expect and anticipate entire filler movies.