ALI G and British film comedy may be stuck in the Dark Ages but American animated comedy has just gone back, or rather forward, to the Ice Age. This is 20th Century Fox's 21st century response to the glorious rise of Disney-Pixar's computer-generated wizardry in the new era of Toy Story.

If Fox's animation in Ice Age lacks the detail of Shrek or Monsters, Inc., nevertheless the storytelling that puts so many 'real people' movies to shame is most definitely on a par.

The liberated sense of fun, the freshness of characters, the skip in the step, the delight in subversion, all mark out the animated adventures of today. Ice Age got it right from the moment its trailer introduced the scurrying prehistoric creature with the hoarding instincts of a squirrel and the persistence of a mouse, frantically trying to bury a nut in the frozen wastes only to crack open an ice shelf, requiring an escape as hazardous as the opening sequence of a James Bond movie.

Aforementioned furry rodent re-appears at regular intervals, doing his nut over his unresponsive acorn, the inventive repetition reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy fighting with a piano or endless jousts in classic cartoons.

The nutty slapstick is but a sideshow for the stars of the snow show: Manfred the stoical Mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) and Sid the lisping little sloth (John Leguizamo), a companion initially as unwelcome as Eddie Murphy's donkey was to the lumbering Shrek, as they make their way against the prehistoric animal flow seeking to escape the Ice Age on the last migration south.

The unlikely duo are on a mission to return an abandoned human baby to its tribe but that will mean bringing sneaky sabre-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary) on side, when the rest of his dangerous pack is having a human snack attack.

More gentle than Toy Story, and not as startlingly inventive or crammed with adult-pleasing humour, Ice Age is nevertheless a winterland of warring, warming humour.

Updated: 09:49 Friday, March 22, 2002