First Term Paper: The Laws of Physics in Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

The Law of Physics in Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

           Speaking of the classic, crazy and funny example for the law of physics in Animation universe, Ice Age series stands out in my lists. It is not only because the series carries my childhood memories, but also its story contains unfettered ideas to entertain kids. However, because this animation pushes the story and comedy into such a high stage that the law of physics is broken to match the interesting effect for the audience.

A classic Ice Age film always starts with a short story about a pre-historic squirrel, Scrat, and his crazy mania to acorns. From the first Ice Age film, Scrat is trying to find an ideal place to hide his food and keep it for the whole winter. Yet, he accidently breaks the iceberg, destroys the wall of dam, and influenced the plate motion—don’t blame him on these; he is just following his animal instinct. However, in the third movie, he finally meets a lovely female ancient squirrel, Scratte, in the forest. She is so adorable that Scrat falls in love with her at first sight…until he sees an acorn. The scene of romantic love turns to be a competing fight to judge who is the owner of an acorn. Scrat uses his power and throws the girl away. Seeing Scratte falls off the cliff, he then regrets and jumps out to catch up with Scratte.

Let’s see how Dawn of the Dinosaurs treats the relationship amount distance, velocity and acceleration in this scene. Since the change in distance equals to the time period multiply the difference in velocity, during two squirrels’ falling, animators ignored the gravity to get the comedy effect of the scene. In the law of real physics, the gravitational acceleration is not effected by objects’ weight or size; therefore, the distance between Scrat and Scratte should be getting longer and longer. In other words, they should not meet each other during the fall. When Scrat jumps off the cliff, Scratte has already fallen for a while and has a certain velocity. As a result, since both of them have the same acceleration due to gravity, Scrat’s velocity will never catch up with Scratte’s. However, in the movie, Scrat still reach Scratte and shares the acorn with her in the air. It seems that the girl appreciates Scrat’s effort and empathy, and then she grabs the acorn and flies away. We suddenly understand that Scratte tricks Scrat by the fact that she is actually a fly squirrel. We laugh because this dramatic change, even though the law of physics changes in this scene.

In addition, there is a funny gravity effect happened after the fighting between the acorn owners continues in the middle of the film. The squirrels fall into the oil pit with the acorn during their fight. When they get out from the oil, all of them are surrounded by bobbles, which make them float into the sky. The acorn flow faster and higher than the two squirrels since it has lighter weight, so the two tried to catch the acorn before the other. They stretch and strike the bobbles, push each other away to achieve their goals.

In the real world, both squirrels are too heavy to be carried by bobbles in that small size. In this case, the squirrels are influenced by the two forces: gravity and air buoyancy. Even if the squirrels are not in the bobbles, the bobbles will fall since the buoyancy equal to the weight of the air. Adding the weight of two squirrels, the bobbles should not float up for sure. Yet, because the gravity is not working in this scene, Scratte is able to get higher and higher with her good control of the bobble. On the other hand, when Scrat is falling, he still can push with his head to force the bobble go into the sky. Although the weightlessness breaks the law of physics, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs brings some hilarious moment by ignoring the law of physics.

During the endless fight between two squirrels, the story of three main characters starts with a conflict. Manny and Ellie finally have their first child, but Manny turns to be too sensitive about his future family. He is careless and loses his attention on two other good friends, Sid and Diego, and gradually they are separated. After Diego’s leave, Sid then finds out three dinosaur’s eggs in an ice cave. He brings the eggs home, and takes good care of them. Soon, three little dinosaurs are born. Sid lives with the dinosaurs, and really thinks he has kids. One day, he brings three dinosaurs to the playground, and the kids then turn the place to be a mass.

In this case, the exaggeration is obvious shown in some action scenes to get an impressive effect. As one of the successful comedy adventure animations, the exaggerated action is everywhere. When the three little dinosaurs are playing with other kids in the playground, their power scares all of the mammals. One of them pushes the swing forward a few feet, but he makes the incredible path of action and throws the kid on the swing into the sky. The pre-historic hippo keeps in the air at least 30 seconds, until Manny cautches him. It shows how powerful these little dinosaurs are, but regarding if a little dinosaur has this strong power or not, it is still a question.

Since the film is about dinosaurs and their underground dreamland, this exaggeration of action is often shown for the power of dinosaurs. Another example is the cruelest dinosaur in the underground, “Rudie.” Wherever he goes, the location would be damaged or even destroyed. When Sid meets him in the wild forest, Rudie tramples over the ground and makes a very deep crack. Lava spews out and destroyes the environment, which blocks Sid in the river of lava.

Most of all, the most impossible exaggeration of action in this film is to see Buck screws his waist. I am sure that it is impossible for most of the creature to do an action like how Buck the Madness twisted his body:

The exaggeration of action uses incredible path of action to leave strong impressions onto the audience. Even though the physics is broken by these ancient animals, the audience still can enjoy the interesting effects in Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. This unbelievable action style is what animation can do, but a live action film can hardly reach to.

When I watched the third film of Ice Age series, I just enjoyed with the funny moment and strong action scene of the story. By looking back and carefully analyzing the physics in this animation, the idealistic rules in this film break what I know about physics in the real world. However, it does not mean that this animation go out of the box. The animators of Ice Age knew where to be fantasy and where should be more realistic. As a result, the law of physics in this animation universe loses some truth, but the effect of this idealistic physics brings happiness moments.