LOS ANGELES, July 17 — Already the second highest-grossing animated franchise of all time, the snowy story series adds one more to its number in 2016’s Ice Age: Collision Course.

What’s it about?

Sabre-toothed squirrel Scrat is launched into space in pursuit of an acorn — as seen in freebie animated short Cosmic Scrat-tastrophe. His single-minded scrabbling ends in disaster, as planets are realigned and life on earth is threatened with adaption or extinction. That’s when the “Ice Age” bunch realize they need to find a new home.

Who’s in it?

Among returning characters are woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), wife Ellie (Queen Latifah) and daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer); Denis Leary’s sabre tooth tiger Diego and his companion in Jennifer Lopez’s Shira; fellow Herd co-founder Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo). Dinosaur tracker Buck (Simon Pegg), who featured in 2009’s Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, is also back.

Newcomers include Shangri Llama (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), Peaches’ future husband Julian (Adam DeVine), Jessie J (new sloth Brooke), Sid’s Granny (Wanda Sykes), and a family of meat-eating Dromaeosaurs (Nick Offerman, Stephanie Beatriz, Max Greenfield).

Who’s behind it?

Ice Age transformed Blue Sky Studios from a visual effects house into the creator of one of cinema’s hit franchises. It has also come up with the two Rio movies, 2015’s The Peanuts Movie, and is adapting children’s book The Story of Ferdinand for 2017.

Michael Thurmeier co-directed the last two Ice Age films and this time partners with Galen Chu, who’s been involved since the 2002 original.

Is it any good?

Early reviews have seen Collision Course achieve a 44 per cent average review score on Metacritic, a 6.2/10 user rating on IMDb, and a 4.1/10 average on Rotten Tomatoes for an 8 per cent approval rating.

If not quite on the same level as the original Ice Age, the good news for fans of recent Ice Age films is that such scores are not all that far off 2012’s Continental Drift (6.7 IMDb, 49 per cent Metacritic, though with a plunge from Rotten Tomatoes’ 37 per cent).

When’s it out?

A staggered schedule means that most audiences will be able to see Ice Age: Collision Course before those in the world’s two biggest theatrical markets, North America and China.

It opens the week of July 13 in much of Europe, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK, as well as Taiwan, Russia, and India; South Korea joins July 21, the USA and Canada July 22, with China booked for August 23. — AFP-Relaxnews