Ice Age became a beloved film all the way back in 2002. It put a mixture of characters (a clueless sloth, a moody mammoth and a level-headed saber tooth tiger) into a vast frozen landscape and let them explore it. Then they added some opossum and a mammoth who thought she was an opossum. Then Johnny Depp. Then some pirates. The list goes on.
Did you know there were four sequels? Well across all five Ice Age films, there have been a number of errors in continuity that have ended up creating inconsistencies either within scenes or between films. Here are ten of the biggest errors we’ve found.
Disappearing Diego
One of the best scenes in the first Ice Age film comes when the dodos (who, for some reason, joke about their own impending extinction) are trying to get their melon back from Manny.
Diego is standing right next to Manny this whole time, until the one shot where Manny holds the melon away from the destructive dodos. When the melon flies off into the air, Diego is back exactly where he started. It seems that they simply forgot to edit Diego into this particular shot.
Where Did That Come From?
Another great moment early on in the first film is designed to show us the, shall we say, limited, intelligence of Sid the sloth. We see a wide shot of him walking with the rest of the gang and all looks clear. Cut to a close up on Sid and, yes, he is stepping into a pile of something less than pleasant.
In this close-up, it’s all very clear what has happened to poor Sid, so you’d think the animators would make sure this remained consistent with the wide shot?
Magical Mud
The cute baby who creates most of the storyline of Ice Age 1 (who, it has been revealed, is called Roshan) is given a mud bath by Manny.
When Manny lifts the baby out, he is covered head to toe in mud, which makes perfect sense. When the shot changes, only the bottom half of him has mud on, but no shot showed it falling off. Then when the camera returns to him again a few seconds later, he has become completely clean without doing anything.
Acorn Teleportation
Scrat is one of the most innovative things about the Ice Age franchise. Providing the main storyline and interjecting it with short clips of something almost completely irrelevant is a stroke of genius that no other film has really been able to replicate since.
However, this side-story isn’t without its faults either. When his acorn is swallowed by piranhas, we see which one gets it. However, when Scrat dives in to save his beloved nut, he manages to retrieve it from a different fish, not the one that actually had it.
Mountain Climbers
This might be the easiest to spot continuity error in the whole of the Ice Age series. When Sid is getting ready to launch himself down his special ice-slide, he begins to count. When he starts counting, Manny and Diego are all the way at the bottom of the mountain.
They get there and he is only on 2 and 4/1000th’s, despite the mountain being exceptionally tall and made of ice. It should have taken them hours to get there, no matter how slowly Sid was counting.
Acorn Maths
Scrat really goes through a hard time. He spends five films trying desperately to be reunited with an acorn he loves very dearly, and every time he gets there, it gets taken away from him. There is one particularly dark scene in Ice Age 2: The Meltdown in which Scrat actually dies and ends up in heaven.
He picks up two acorns while in heaven, then comes across five more, picking them all up. He only has six, though, so one of these must have disappeared on him just like his favorite acorn back down in the real world. Very sad.
Invisible Knife
Buck makes himself seem tough and cool, but he really isn’t, and most of the established Ice Age characters see right through him.
He drops his knife while explaining that he’ll help the herd find Sid, but said knife completely disappears when the shot changes. It comes straight back, however, as soon as they wander off once more.
Pirate Weapons
During the scene in which the pirates (in Ice Age 4) are fighting during the land bridge trap, their weapons spend most of their time switching places and hands that doing anything weapons should do.
For example, Flynn once had a skull sword, and now has Raz’s spear; a few moments into the scene and Raz has her spear back; Gupta’s dagger changes hands about five times. By the end of the scene, every weapon is broken or overboard, yet everyone manages to end up with a weapon at the end.
Where Did Those Trees Go?
While being chased around Switchback Cove, we are shown the many trees on which Sid hits his head when Manny holds him up. In a couple of different shots, there are no trees in sight behind them at all. So what did Sid hit his head on?
The only explanation is that they animated the trees specifically for the joke and then forgot to keep their continuity consistent in the following scenes.
Moving Acorn
By the time Ice Age 5 had released in 2016, things had taken some very strange turns for the herd. Not only had they previously found out that dinosaurs were still alive in one of the previous films, but now some space travel is involved.
As always, its Scrat who gets the brunt of these difficult situations. He chases his acorn all the way out to an asteroid, which cracks in half and leaves his across resting on the back. The asteroid then heads for Earth with the acorn in a completely different place.
