By Zach Johnson
The pack is back!
The all-new animated adventure The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, now streaming on Disney+, continues the hilarious escapades of the beloved sub-zero heroes from the globally successful Ice Age franchise. The characters and stories are timeless… making it hard to believe it’s been two decades since the first Ice Age film was released!
The film’s executive producer, Lori Forte, has been with the franchise from the beginning, working on such feature films as Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), and Ice Age: Collision Course (2016), as well as a handful of shorts and television specials, including Surviving Sid (2008), Scrat’s Continental Crack-Up (2010), and Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (2016)—to name just a few. “I don’t think anyone, especially me, could’ve predicted after we made the first film 20 years ago that there would be another one—let alone several more!” Forte tells D23 in an exclusive interview. “Audiences have really come to love these characters and these stories so much.”
Although the first five films were produced by Blue Sky Studios (which Disney acquired in 2019), Forte feels the characters and stories have always upheld the standards of Disney animation. “Part of the reason people embraced the first film so much is that there were lovable characters,” she says. “It was very funny, it had real heart, and it was about three disparate characters coming together to form a family. The idea that you don’t have to be related by blood to be a family was a very universal theme. As the films continued, we built upon that idea. Families grow and change. People come and go from families. Families expand. With every film, we wanted to incorporate some of those ideas and show milestones in the characters’ lives—how we are changed by them and how we grow by them—so that at the end of each film, they’re not quite the same characters they were when it began, and certainly not the same characters they were when the franchise began.”
The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, a Disney+ Original movie, follows the one-eyed, adventure-loving weasel Buck Wild (voiced by Simon Pegg) as he sets off to rescue the thrill-seeking possum brothers Crash and Eddie (voiced by Vincent Tong and Aaron Harris, respectively) who got trapped beneath the ice in a massive cave inhabited by dinosaurs. With the help of some new friends, including a zorilla named Zee (voiced by Justina Machado), they all embark on a mission to save the Lost World from dinosaur domination.
For years, Forte says, she had hoped to tell a story that centered on the character Buck Wild, who was introduced in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. “Our writers created the character, but Simon brought it to life in ways we would have never expected,” she says. “We just fell in love with him and knew that we didn’t want our journey with Buck to end.”
Pegg, too, had been eager to revisit his role—and making Buck the star of the first film in the franchise to debut on Disney+ afforded them the “perfect opportunity” to do just that, says Forte. “Buck is a lovable character. He’s eccentric, he’s joyful, he’s wacky, he’s wild. He’s the guardian of the Lost World of Dinosaurs! How much more excitement do you need?”
In The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, she says, “We’re giving him a chance to experience new things, to have new relationships, to grow and change. Buck has always been a very solitary character; he’s very much a loner. But in Buck Wild, you’ll see a little bit of how Buck adapts and evolves after all these new characters are thrown into his life.”
Forte began her career in feature animation at Disney, where she was the creative executive on two Oscar®-nominated titles, Toy Story (1995) and Runaway Brain (1995), and was also involved with The Lion King (1994) and Pocahontas (1995). Forte then became a producer for Fox Animation Studios, where she developed several feature film ideas and conceived the idea to make a movie about an icy world and its extraordinary inhabitants.
After all these years, Forte says there’s “no end” to the stories she wants to tell in the Ice Age franchise. “Look at all of our characters,” she says. “There’s Sid and his kooky family. There’s Diego, who’s got a rich backstory, too; he’s a wonderful, wonderful character. There’s Ellie. So, if Disney wants us to make more films, we have so many stories yet to tell.”
