Category: News

This week’s The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild is the franchise’s sixth film installment. The film is a testament to the franchise’s lasting success which has now expanded to several mediums such as video games and television. Murphy’s Multiverse got to attend the press junket for the film which included director John C. Donkin and longtime producer Lori Forte.

Lori Forte explained why the team behind the franchise decided to give Buck Wild of all characters the spotlight for this film.

Buck is such a lovable character. We just adored him in the first movie and in Dawn of the Dinosaurs. And we always knew [Simon Pegg] wanted to do something more and so we did. We found another way of bringing him back in Collision Course. But it just felt like he deserved his own movie. He deserves his own spinoff because the character himself, he’s just so iconic. He’s clever, he’s an adventurer, he’s a swashbuckler, he’s a protector and guardian of the lost world. It’s such a great, great character to have. We love to go on adventures with him because he’s just not afraid of anything.

For director John C. Donkin, it made sense to make a new film about the evergreen theme of family.

One of the great themes of this film is the family angle. And we loved the idea of once you’re in a herd, which is our family, it’s a herd. They’re equivalent. Once you’re in a herd and you have that connection, it’s okay if there’s some physical separation between you, because there’s always going to be shared love and support. 

The notion was enforced further by Forte, who said the coinciding pandemic helped bolster the film’s very timely themes.

I think we started with the story way before COVID obviously happened. So it’s just a universal message for all time. And because COVID happened, it seems strikingly apparent now, that the message about family and staying together, even if you’re not together, and being together, whether you’re not together. I think that all works, but I think it’s a universal theme for any time. 

Justina Machado is the latest addition to the Ice Age family, making her debut in this month’s The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild. Machado plays Zee, a zorilla whose past brings her into Buck Wild’s orbit. She’s a feisty fighter with a skill set unique to her character.

In the press junket for the film, Machado had nothing but nice things to say about being inducted into such an iconic franchise.

I remember seeing the original one with John Leguizamo and Ray Romano. I’ve always loved these movies. It was a little scary also to come into this family and be as exciting as the other characters. But after seeing the movie, I’m really proud of what we did and how it came out but it was fun and exciting and an honor to be a part of this franchise. It was a lot of fun. 

Producer Lori Forte explained the importance of Machado to the creative process, saying that the character was developed the more they got to work with Machado in the recording booth.

I think in this case with Zee, because she was a new character, when we started working with Justina, we were finding the character and and she was finding the character too. But the more sessions that went on, the more we got to know Justina, we started taking traits from her, like her strength and her personality and her in-your -face kind of thing. And it sort of wove into the character itself. And so Zee was very much part of who Justina is, I think.

Machado herself iterated on the challenges of voicing Zee as a character and how the development process helped her find her footing.

We developed it together. John, Lori and I developed a whole character together. It’s so hard to play somebody in control and badass. Those are my favorite characters to play and they gave me the liberty to do that. So it was just pure fun because the theme is love and family and chosen family and courage and all of those things.