Animal
magic: designer Peter de Seve. Source: Supplied
Neala Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, reports
Ice Age 5: Down Under.
"I keep coming back to Australian animals, there are so many fascinating ones. All the weird ones, all the interesting ones, are from Australia."
So says Peter de Seve, the man from whose pencil all of your favourite Ice Age characters - Manny the woolly mammoth, Diego the sabre tooth tiger, Sid the sloth - sprung.
The character designer reckons sending the crew down south for a fifth instalment of the mega-successful animated franchise might be the way to go, after he tried and failed to fit more Aussie-inspired characters into this year's Ice Age 4: Continental Drift.
For a while there, he explains, the leader of the iceberg pirate ship, the nasty orang-utan Captain Gutt, could have been a bear or a wombat.
How do you turn a wombat into an Ice Age character?
"Well, apparently I can't," laughs de Seve, "because I wasn't very successful doing it. I was playing with a giant wombat for Gutt and I thought, 'That would be fun'. But I couldn't make that work.
"Yet I kept coming back to Australian animals, there are so many fascinating ones. But I couldn't have a boat full of Australians, I could only pick one or two, so it was Raz."
A member of Captain Gutt's unruly pirate posse, Raz is a feral-looking kangaroo voiced by Australian funny lady Rebel Wilson.
Though the designer takes a lot of liberties with how close his characters are to animals that actually lived in the ice age, Raz is based in reality.
"There are some pretty complete skeletons of an ancient kangaroo who was really nasty looking," de Seve explains.
"What made it unique was, rather than three or four toes it had just one talon for its feet, this great big claw. And, based on the shape of the skull, it's known that they had these snub, pug noses. So they just look like really nasty, pugnacious kangaroos. How could I skip that?"
Along with Raz and Gutt, Ice Age 4 introduced Sid's elderly sloth grandmother, blubbery elephant seal Flynn and a cute little army of hyraxes.
But after four movies, de Seve's most beloved and infamous creation remains Scrat, a kind of saber-toothed squirrel whose desperate quest for acorns has instigated the events in every Ice Age.
Scrat is a superstar these days, but he had very humble beginnings.
"Just like Ice Age itself," says de Seve, "nobody expected it to be a huge success at all. And nobody, least of all me, expected it of this character - it was like, 'This is one of the things I've got to get out of the way today'.
"I probably would have worked harder on him if I'd known he was going to be the most famous animated character in the world. But it's probably just as well. None of us had any idea we were creating something that audiences would relate to so much.
"Scrat was supposed to be part of a small sequence in the beginning of the first film. He gets crushed at the end of that and he's at the bottom of a great big mammal's foot and that's the end.
"But the audience loved it so much even in the trailer; they thought, 'I wanna see that movie, but I wanna see him in that movie'. So he had to come back."
Has de Seve allowed himself the luxury of believing Scrat may stand the test of time like the Looney Toons characters he so loved growing up? Is this acorn-obsessed critter up there with Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote?
"I don't tend to think in those terms but it wouldn't surprise me if he endured," de Seve says.
"Part of it is that Fox has used him judiciously. They haven't over-saturated the market with him. I haven't seen him selling any peanuts or anything like that ... but it could happen!"
SEE Ice Age 4: Continental Drift is out now on Blu-ray 3D and 2D, DVD and digital copy
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