The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022)
★ — The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022)
The Ice Age franchise has been a fixture of animated family entertainment since the first film arrived in 2002, and over the following two decades it managed to rack up four sequels and a handful of spin-offs with varying degrees of success. By the time The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild landed on Disney+ in January 2022, the series was well into its extended life, and this particular entry has the distinction of being the first in the franchise to skip cinemas entirely and go straight to the streaming platform. Produced by Bardel Entertainment, a Vancouver-based animation studio with a long history in television production, and released under the Walt Disney Pictures banner, the film runs a tidy 82 minutes and focuses on Buck, the one-eyed weasel who had been a fan favourite since his introduction in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. The premise sends Buck and the possum brothers Crash and Eddie on a new escapade through Dinosaur World, the subterranean prehistoric land that had served as a backdrop in earlier entries. It is, on paper, a reasonable enough hook for a spin-off aimed squarely at younger viewers.
The film is directed by John C. Donkin, whose background is primarily in production and animation television rather than feature directing, and that context is worth bearing in mind when setting expectations. Simon Pegg, who has built a career across everything from Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy (you can find thoughts on Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead elsewhere on this site) to big-budget science fiction franchises, returns to voice Buck, a role he took over from Ray Romano's Ice Age regular Manny as the character making the step up to lead. The rest of the principal voice cast includes Vincent Tong and Aaron Harris as Crash and Eddie, with Utkarsh Ambudkar and Justina Machado filling out the ensemble. It is a workmanlike line-up, and the talent is there on paper, even if animated features live or die by the material their voice cast is given to work with. Compared to something like Trolls, which had its own mix of pop energy and family-friendly chaos, or the quieter craft of Josep, this production sits at a rather different point on the spectrum of animated ambition.
This isn’t just bad, it’s budget-less, soulless, and feels like a direct-to-streaming cash-in made by interns using a screensaver and a dream. The animation looks like it melted. The jokes are non-existent or painfully forced. The plot is two annoying teens (I mean, honey badgers) run around doing dumb stuff while Buck tries (and fails) to make it interesting. My kid loved Buck, so of course we watched it. But now I have to live with what I’ve done.
I'll be honest, I came into this one hoping that Pegg's energy might at least carry it through the rougher patches, given what he's capable of when the writing is behind him. It wasn't enough. There's a particular kind of disappointment that comes with watching something made under a recognisable banner that feels entirely disconnected from what made that banner worth trusting in the first place, and this film serves as a fairly clear example of streaming quantity quietly crowding out quality. If your little one is asking to watch it, well, that's parenting for you. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon US
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