Ice Age is an enjoyable enough film, with some clever humour (mostly at the edges of the frame) and not a lot of Ray Romano's voice (which annoyed me mere moments into the one and only time I tried to watch Everybody Loves Raymond - yeah, I know, I have my moments of superficiality, too). Still, I wasn't entirely comfortable with its saccharine portrayal of interspecies friendship.

At points in the film, the sloth in the group (voice of John Leguizamo) tells the wooly mammoth (Romano) that he should settle down and have a family. About halfway though Ice Age, there's a scene where the great beast sees a cave painting of a mammoth family; in a clever bit of animation, the painting comes alive, but the mammoth's fond nostalgia turns to sadness when the family is hunted down by spear-throwing humans. (Oh, so that's why he couldn't find a mate - I like the way this was underplayed.)

This comes after the main characters have decided to take an infant human back to its parents. This so does not ring true: if your species had been all but wiped out, would you in any way want to assist any of the members of the species that had decimated you? (In the scene, the baby reaches up to the painting and touches a baby mammoth; we're supposed to believe that Romano's character chooses to help the human because he makes the connections between helpless infants of all species. Nice try, but...)

But Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiraaaaaaaaa, I hear you cry, you're an adult. You have the wrong sensibility for this kind of film. It's perfect for children. I disagree; in fact, I think movies like this (where the heroes seem to die, but miraculously recover in order to supply a happy ending) patronize children. But I needed an eight year-old with a developmental handicap and a dead dog to help me find a way to express exactly why.

Our family dog, Nugget, was diagnosed with advanced cancer a couple of weeks before I saw Ice Age; she had lost a huge amount of weight, was in a lot of pain and could barely move, and the only humane thing to do was put her to sleep. We had had the dog for about 10 years; my eight year-old nephew, Emo, had known her all his life.

This was the first time a living thing he knew had died. Before this, whenever we had played a game involving one of us dying, he assumed that we would just get up again. The inability to comprehend the permanence of death is apparently a common aspect of the way young children understand the world. In Emo's case, this is confounded by the fact that he has Sodo's Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects his physical growth and intellectual capacity. Thus, after Nugget's death, we were not sure if our explanations of what death was really had sunk in.

A week later, we were watching videos; Emo asked specifically to see Disney's The Lion King. When I put it on, it was somewhere towards the end of the video. (We need a Blockbuster-like rewind policy in my house - but I digress.) Emo wound the tape back to the scene where, because of another lion's treachery, the lion cub's father is trampled to death by a herd of stampeding animals.

After the scene, Emo rewound the tape and watched it a second time.

And a third.

And a fourth.

In the room where we watch videos, my mother keeps stuffed animals, including a couple of lions. As we watched the death scene from The Lion King, we used the animals to reenact it on my mother's bed.

Now, I'm generally not a big fan of Disney, a gargantuan corporation which regularly disembowels great literature (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and plays fast and loose with historical accuracy (Mulan, Pocahontas) in order to profit from the production of glibly happy portraits of the world. However, to give the devil his due, films like The Lion King (and, I would argue, Bambi before it) treat the important subject of life and death with the gravity it deserves, giving children who are starting to deal with such questions a way of approaching them (and older relatives a touchstone through which they can begin discussions of such questions with the children).

In short, these films respect children. While there is much to enjoy in Ice Age, it raises questions (like the extinction of animal species) which it doesn't seriously address.

Because of his handicap, Emo still has difficulty expressing his feelings in words, so I can't say with any certainty how much he understood about what happened to our dog or why the film affected him so much. When I asked him if the death of the father lion reminded him of Nugget's death, in a small voice he told me, "They're not the same." Still, the film clearly touched him very deeply at this emotional (and challenging) moment in his life.

I hope The Lion King helped my nephew get a handle on the concept of death. If so, it is a testament to the power of art, and a reminder of the responsibility artists have to do more than just provide 90 minutes of mindless entertainment.

Copyright © 2002 Ira Nayman. All Rights Reserved.