YMMV / Ice Age

• Accidental Innuendo: Sid asking Manny to lend him some wood to build a shelter has earned some snickers from immature fans.
  "Hey, you're a big guy, you got a lot of wood. I'm a little guy."
• Ass Pull: Diego's survival has NEVER been explained to any adequate degree beyond, "Well, this is a kid's movie so we can't really have him die."
• Base-Breaking Character: Manny specifically in the first one. Most people liked him in the first one while some thought he was too much of a jerk. However, as he's softened, he's not exactly become a hated character, but he's been complained about for being boring and being too overprotective.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans of the first film are split on whether Don Bluth's version would have been better or not.
  • Also Diego's resurrection; some fans thought his story would have had more power if he actually sacrificed himself (especially given how little many felt he got to do throughout the sequels), some fans are just happy he's alive, and others didn't necessarily want him to die but just wished there was more of an explanation as to how he came back to life, especially given it's pretty clear in his "death" scene he was meant to die.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Some fans like to over-romanticize Soto as this. One person to such an extent that the Sub-Zero Heroes become Ron The Death Eaters, Diego especially, because of the whole "brother with Soto" fanon.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Much fandom ink has been spilled about the scene where Diego experiences a Heel Realization after Manny almost dies saving Diego from a literal plunge into the fiery pit.
• Fanon:
  • A lot of fans like to think that Diego and Soto are brothers. It leads to a Cain and Abel motif in the first movie if you subscribe to this fan theory, thus making it even Darker and Edgier for the first installment. Then again, it's not like this is the only animated film that involves a villainous big cat plotting to kill his brother.
  • Soto being Not Quite Dead pops up somewhat commonly in fanfiction.
  • The implication that Runar's tribe killed Manny's family. It's never truly established as being this in the film, but fan reading of canon often goes with this conclusion.
  • The implication that the two rhinos at the beginning are a gay couple. Blue Sky has given no official confirmation for this, but most fans (casual and hardcore) tend to read them as a couple, but it's still fanon. And oddly enough the world of Ice Age fanfic ignores them as well, when the fanfiction realm is well-known for its love of slash pairings. Make of that what you will.
• Faux Symbolism: Manny rescuing Diego from the fiery flames of the lava. Not to mention that Roshan's role in the film is a "Peace Child" between the humans and the animals, and it's his innocence that helps redeem Diego, helps Sid find a new family, and gives Manny closure after his family's death, and reconciliation with the people who destroyed his life. It's one aspect of the Original movie - that is, Roshan's importance - that is often glossed over, but he changed all of the characters taking care of him because of his love and innocence, was central to character and plot resolutions and by the end Manny, Diego and Sid are a herd because of Roshan bringing them together as true friends.
• Franchise Original Sin: The first film contained a decent amount of Toilet Humor (Sid stepping in the glyptodont poop), adult humor (Sid saying that a girlfriend would "go all praying mantis" on him, amongst other things), and modern references (During the montage, a glacier was seen acting like a passing bus). However, this was underplayed compared to the sequels (In the case of the modern reference, it was just there for a quick joke), and the first film still had enough heart to make up for all of it. And furthermore, all the major characters had a purpose to their presence and genuinely contributed to the narrative, whereas several characters (both old and new alike) in the sequels would end up coming across at times as having no real reason to be there at best and reduced to pointless or annoying comic relief at worst.
• Genre Turning Point: The film was the first major CGI movie that wasn't made either by Pixar or DreamWorks Animation to do well at the box office, being a Blue Sky Studios production (even if Pixar's owner Disney later bought the rights when they bought Blue Sky's owner 20th Century Fox in 2019). As such, it proved that CGI movies were no longer just a minor novelty from two competing companies and helped make CGI films into a big figure in the mainstream box office.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • While saying goodbye to Roshan, Manny tells him that they'll never forget him. This becomes blissfully ironic as Roshan is completely forgotten about in the sequels. The best we got was a cameo in the beginning of Adventures of Buck Wild during Ellie's recap of the first 5 movies.
  • Diego's line "can't have one of your own, so you want to adopt", while only meant at the time as snark, becomes much harsher after the reveal that Manny's mate and child were killed by humans.
  • Before the heroes enter the ice cave, Sid is joking around by pretending to be impaled in the neck with an icicle. How does Soto die again?
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Manny's loneliness wouldn't last long. In the sequel, Manny finds another mate in Ellie, and in 3, he has a daughter named Peaches. The main difference is that unlike his first family, Manny actually kept this new family alive long enough to see his daughter become a fully grown mammoth before setting off to find a family of her on.
  • Roshan's aforementioned cameo in Adventures of Buck Wild. While brief, it shows that despite everything and despite all the years having gone by, the Sub-Zero Heroes truly never forgot him if Ellie was able to hear about him during her opening monologue.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Ray Romano manages to pull off a genuinely heartfelt performance as Manny.
  • Denis Leary as Diego; while many of his previous acting performances were mostly well received, he tended to play the same aggressive, hyperactive jerk in almost every movie. Here he plays a more calm, collected if still macho and insecure character and actually pulls it off. Plus he also did well in the more dramatic scenes.
  • We also have Jack Black in an early voice role, being almost completely unrecognizable as Zeke. Since Ice Age, he's gone on to prove his skills as a voice actor in other animated films like Shark Tale and especially the Kung Fu Panda series.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The first movie had a T. rex frozen in ice as a gag. In Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the heroes find a lost world of surviving dinosaurs below ground. It led to fan speculation that the "meltdown" in the second movie actually freed the dinosaurs in the third movie.
  • The first movie also had a UFO frozen in ice as a random sight gag, but fast forward to the premise of the fifth movie...
  • During the scene with the cave paintings, Sid comments that you never see any sloths in them. In 2020, rock art was discovered in Colombia that depicted what many have interpreted as a ground sloth.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Manny, when we find out what happens to his family.
  • Diego, when he can't decide whether to betray his pack or his new friends.
• Like You Would Really Do It: There’s no reason to believe that Manny, the protagonist of the movie, would actually fall to his death in the lava pit in the original, especially if you already know about his presence in the sequels.
• Memetic Loser: Roshan, better known these days as the "Ice Age Baby", has become jokingly loathed by memers since early 2020 as they often portray him getting brutally tortured or killed.
• Moral Event Horizon: If wanting to eat Roshan alive and threatening to kill his henchmen wasn't bad enough, Soto certainly crosses it once he attempts to kill Diego after the latter's Heel–Face Turn.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Zeke is voiced by Jack Black, who would later be the main character in his own Dreamworks Animation film series, the third of which came out the same year as the last film of this series.
  • Lenny and Dab the dodo are both voiced by future Disney good luck charm Alan Tudyk. He also voices characters in The Meltdown and Continental Drift (the latter of which came out the same year as the first Disney animated movie to feature him, Wreck-It Ralph).
• Saved by the Fans: Scrat was originally going to be killed off after his brief scene in the opening of the first movie, but the overwhelming response to advance footage led the filmmakers to add more scenes with him, and he continued to appear throughout the franchise, becoming not only the de-facto mascot of the series, but of Blue Sky Studios as well.
• Signature Scene: The "Send Me on My Way" Migration Montage that has Manny, Sid, and Diego traveling towards Glacier Pass basically sums up what the Ice Age films are all about. The herd occasionally playing charades while heading to where they decided to go, with Scrat during this sequence is also quite memorable.
• Signature Song: You can't think of this movie without "Send Me On My Way".
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Most of the film’s criticism focuses on that it’s pretty similar to Shrek and Monsters, Inc., the former for Manny and Sid respectively recalling Shrek and Donkey as both being pairs of a giant grumpy but good hearted beast pestered by an unwanted companion and the latter for its baby returning plot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Diego's entire pack especially Soto. For the supposed main villains of the movie, they barely get any screen time and mainly just exist to kick off the plot then get beaten by the main trio. It doesn't help they're hardly even mentioned in the sequels outside of Diego briefly mentioning how he left them in Continental Drift.
• Ugly Cute: The baby has been mocked by some people for his odd appearance, yet he still behaves no differently than any other baby and has some wholesome moments with the main cast.

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