With its first full-length, digitally animated film, 20th Century Fox commences battle with Disney and Dreamworks.

Ice Age doesn't exactly challenge the likes of Shrek and Monsters, Inc, but I don't think it's intended to.

It has its share of grown-up jokes - as all animated movies must - but, essentially, it's one for the very young.

The story is as simple as you could get: the ice age is beginning and the animals, plus an early tribe of humans, are moving south.

A certain human has seriously cheesed off a bunch of sabre-toothed tigers, one of whom (voiced by Denis Leary) is sent to snatch the man's child.

Enter a woolly mammoth (Ray Romano) and his unwanted companion, a constantly chattering sloth (John Leguizamo).

This unusual pair, coming across the abandoned baby, determine to protect it from the tiger and return it to its tribe.

This is not necessarily the kind of sensitive behaviour you or I might expect from a mammoth and a sloth but children will no doubt accept it, just as they will accept that the tiger, initially hanging around for sinister purposes, begins to bond with the other two animals.

The message here is that nothing beats teamwork and the film puts it across amiably enough.

That the animation is excellent almost goes without saying these days and, if it's not exactly innovative, well, we can't expect groundbreaking stuff every time.

There's an amusingly worried squirrel, Leguizamo and Leary both give great voice and I rather liked Romano, though others have criticised him for being too low-key.

Tim Evans