The Show
Fresh from its Fox TV debut, Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas Special catches up with wooly Manny, saber-toothed Diego, Sid the sloth and the rest of the gang as they make their own extended-family yuletide preparations. Sid is as oblivious and accident-prone as ever, and he manages to destroy Manny's prized heirloom, a giant Christmas rock, and in his anger the mammoth invents the notion of Santa Claus' "naughty list," telling Sid that he's now earned a place on it.
Sid, being an idiot, doesn't take the news well, and he and some cohorts soon plan a journey to The North Pole in order to talk Santa into a reprieve. But before long they manage to endanger Christmas altogether, and it's up to the lot of these noble beasts to save the day. Along the way they stumble upon even more inspiration for the traditions we now take for granted, and even bump into a few classic holiday characters.
This new mini-adventure is peppered with a lot of tried-and-true gags, the heroes falling into familiar (perhaps too familiar?) roles, but at least the proceedings are not blasphemous, once we wrap our heads around the fact that they are celebrating Christmas long before the year Zero.
The Picture
Such shorter programs can afford an extremely generous bit budget, even on a single-layer disc like this, and the high-bitrate AVC presentation made possible here--usually in the upper-30-megabits-per-second, occasionally crossing over into the very low 40s--is a friend to the Blue Sky digital animation. Backgrounds are sharper than expected, the skies smoothly transition through colors other than blue, and a whiteout scene is remarkably stable despite a 16:9 frame filled with a thin layer of undulating CG snow. Hairs aren't always razor-sharp, and there is some very mild video streaking, but for a TV special this one is undeniably a cut above.
The Sound
The DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack caught my attention early on with a quick, fun bass thump when a pair of mammoths hits the ground, and the active 5.1 soundfield is a fine complement to the broad, bold physical comedy on display. Discrete channels are employed to put individual elements around us, with respectable directionality for flying snowballs and such. The rears are aggressively exploited throughout, and the musical score is big and wide and clean.
The Extras
The disc contains two brief bonus clips. The first is a complete, final-quality scene from the fourth installment in the Ice Age feature film franchise, Continental Drift, coming in July of next year. It plays automatically after Mammoth Christmas and runs two minutes, featuring Wanda Sykes as Sid's grandmother. There's also a music video for a stylized version of "Jingle Bells" that repurposes footage from the special in holiday-themed ways (three minutes). Both of these are in HD with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.
Disc Two is a standard-definition DVD of the special and both video extras. Disc Three carries a Digital Copy of the special for iTunes or Windows Media.
Final Thoughts
If you or your kids have grown fond of the prehistoric pals and are looking for a new holiday cartoon to sandwich between Charlie Brown and The Grinch, you could do a lot worse than this amusing little romp, viewable in solid high-def and just about every other format we could ask Santa for.
Product Details
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