If you’ve seen any of the “Ice Age” animated Disney motion pictures, we have now some dangerous news: You don’t know the actual ice age.
It was an unimaginable time when the Earth was going by means of immense systemic adjustments and was stuffed with typically nightmarish creatures — carnivorous kangaroos, 14-foot-tall bears and armadillos greater than vehicles. Sid the sloth’s eyes would bulge much more.
A hyper-realistic image of life throughout that Pleistocene period emerges with Apple TV’s five-part, computer-driven “Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age,” which takes place thousands and thousands of years after the dinosaurs’ extinction.
“Nobody’s made a natural history representation of these creatures behaving and interacting in the way that we have in this series,” says Mike Gunton, co-executive producer and senior govt on the storied BBC Natural History Unit.
This is the third chapter within the “Prehistoric Planet” sequence, mixing cinematic storytelling with photorealistic visible results and the newest scientific information to offer viewers a deal with: Nostrils flare, fur is rustled by howling winds and eyelashes twitch.
“Within one second of turning the show on, I do not want people to think, ‘Oh, it’s a CGI show.’ I want them to think, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s that animal? Where did they film that?’” Gunton says.
The filmmaking type mimics the visible vocabulary of documentary nature exhibits like “Planet Earth” or “Blue Planet” however conjures up animals lifeless for thousands and thousands of years with the newest digital improvements.
“Even five years ago, we couldn’t have done it,” says Gunton. “Even in the time we’ve been making it, the acceleration of the power of the visual effects has been absolutely noticeable.”
The sequence is narrated by Golden Globe- and Olivier Award-winner Tom Hiddleston, with an authentic rating by Hans Zimmer, Anže Rozman and Kara Talve from Bleeding Fingers Music.
Jon Favreau is co-executive producer and got here on the sequence after directing the live-action/CGI “The Jungle Book” in 2016 with Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o and Scarlett Johansson, and 2019’s “The Lion King,” with a voice forged together with Donald Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
“I was very struck by the photorealism we were able to achieve in both of those projects and this seemed like a really good application for using realism in both animation and environmental design and render to create the illusion that you’re actually looking at something real and to apply it to dinosaurs and ice age megafauna,” he says.
Gunton, who has produced such nature exhibits as “Hidden Kingdoms” and “The Green Planet,” turned to the subject of the ice age greater than three years in the past after wrapping up two dino-filled earlier chapters and shortly discovered he had quite a bit to be taught.
“I used to be considering, ‘Well, this is all going to be ice and woolly mammoths and mastodons and saber-tooth tigers,” he says. What he found out was there wasn’t only one ice age however a sequence of eight, and whereas as a lot as 1 / 4 of Earth’s landmass was lined by ice, the remaining was turning into arid and desert, altering animals’ evolution.
There have been Diprotodons, rhino-sized kin of wombats and the biggest marsupials of all time. There have been large short-faced kangaroos and 14-foot-tall bears.
One of the cutest creatures is a dwarf Stegodon, which resembled a 3-foot elephant. The filmmakers added its child, standing simply 12 inches, and we meet him enjoying with a butterfly.
“A swishing trunk and tail means a Stegodon wants to play,” says Hiddleston. But the little man will get into bother when a gang of 6-foot large storks come looking. Mom, fortunately, involves the rescue. “In a world where birds can eat elephants, you should never stray too far from Mother,” Hiddleston concludes.
“These animals feel alive,” says Gunton. “That comes from spending 35, nearly 40 years filming animals, watching animals, knowing how they react to each other and also knowing how to photograph these kind of behaviors.”
While the look of the sequence is innovative, Favreau factors out that it was crafted with artists and conventional technological strategies, not AI, and that helps it join.
“At the end of the day, to be working side by side with artists, animators, filmmakers — there is something that creates a very specific and personal and emotional connection with tremendous specificity, which is still something that eludes the other technologies.”
During the ice age, sea ranges dropped, creating land bridges and connecting North and South America to create a form of animal superhighway, with creatures entering into each instructions and encountering new rivals and meals.
The filmmakers leaned on the visible results firm Framestore and consulted over 50 ice age specialists to create the sequence, typically utilizing puppets to get the photographs proper earlier than eradicating them and including the visible results. Fossil information are higher than with dinosaurs as a result of most of the ice age creatures have been captured within the permafrost.
“We see that the species that were most able to adapt still survive to this day, and there are many that didn’t,” says Favreau. “We’re capturing a moment here where there was transition in relatively short amount of time. Even though it would be thousands of years, it’s still a blink of an eye in the history of our planet.”
“Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age,” tells little vignettes for every animal, displaying how they hunt or mate, journey and play. Gunton says he is not desirous about making an infinite loop of predators chasing prey. He’d reasonably present how a pregnant woolly mammoth misplaced in a blizzard may be protected by her herd.
“I think that audiences are more engaged in complexity of relationships and what animals do and how they behave with each other,” he said. “The voyeuristic kill doesn’t interest me particularly, and I don’t think it interests most of the audience.”
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This materials is probably not printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed with out permission.