Ice Age: Dawn of Dinosaurs trailer review

Over the coming months, a couple of cartoon franchises are set to grace cinema screens with their latest instalments. The first is Madagascar 2: Escape To Africa, coming out in time for Christmas.

The second is Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and the trailer follows the same pattern as for the previous pair. Filling the screen is sabre-toothed rat, Scrat, continuing his never-ending quest to catch that Acorn (he’s a persistent fellow this one). So, how to re-energise a well-worn joke? Throw in a lady sabre-toothed rat, lots of slow-mo hair swishing and pipe in the Lou Rawls love-fest that is You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine over the top. The result is very funny and successfully manages to place you right back in that ever-familiar Ice Age universe, but without the feeling that you’ve seen these jokes before (which of course you have).

From there, some excellent animation sees the pair tussle and fray until lady sabre-toothed rat is thrown off a cliff and Scrat has to do a Tom Cruise and rescue her. When Lou Rawls kicks in again, you realise that you’ll already laughed out loud two or three times in the space of around a minute and a half, and the payoff is genius, emitting a genuine ‘Aaaw’ from my mouth.

That this is one of the best trailers I’ve seen all year and fair play to the bods at Blue Sky for reintroducing the franchise with such humour. Fingers crossed this one lives up to its early promise when it lands next summer.

Watch it here...