Scrat

Early conception and design Scrat is a fictional species of rodent from the Ice Age franchise with both squirrel and rat physical traits and movements. The origins of Scrat's conception is unclear, with Louisa Mellor of Den of Geek stating that he "seems to have more origin stories going around than Spider-Man". According to The Art of Ice Age by Tara Bennet, multiple artists had encountered different inspirations that all led to the development of Scrat's characteristics. During the production of Ice Age, the Blue Sky Studios co-founder and film director Chris Wedge struggled to think of an introduction showcasing the setting's climate but imagined the possibility of a glacier pressuring one small character or a group of characters. The studio artist Peter de Sève was the lead designer for the Ice Age characters and derived his animal designs from his research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York. He noted that he was told not to design any rodent character for the film but later took design inspiration from kangaroo rats in his research. According to Wedge, de Sève dug through hundreds of his sketches, pulling out a drawing of a squirrel character with large eyes and striped body later known as a "proto-version of Scrat"; the movie director then accepted the character concept for his film and told him to simply add saber teeth to the design. Later at the same day, the storyboard artist Bill Frake suggested that the squirrel be used for a storyline involving him burying his nuts for the winter and storyboarded it with the approval of Wedge. The film producer Lori Forte similarly recalled that she and Wedge wanted the "pre-historic squirrel, a sabre-tooth squirrel" to be in the movie after having observed de Sève's works in his office. In a 2009 blog, the film co-writer Michael J. Wilson said he took inspiration for the character from his daughter, Flora, who at age 3 called a squirrel "Scrat", combining the words "squirrel" and "rat". His account conflicts with court documents in 2003 that reported de Sève being the character creator and the film model maker John Dodelson naming the character "Scrat" while sculpting a clay model for the squirrel. Since the first Ice Age movie, Scrat's dialogue-free voice was provided by Chris Wedge in the franchise. Shortly after the 2002 release of Ice Age, which received positive receptions, Blue Sky Studios, the studio behind the film, sought to have a project to fill in a production gap before the start of their next feature film. The director Carlos Saldanha and the same creative team for Ice Age produced the 2002 short film Gone Nutty, an animation that features Scrat as the protagonist. The team developed a better understanding of Scrat's character and improved their technological uses in animation. Copyright and trademark controversies . Sqrat was the subject of copyright and trademark lawsuits by Supersonic against 20th Century Studios due to his design similarities to Scrat. In May 1999, the New York City fashion designer Ivy Supersonic reportedly encountered a squirrel that apparently had a rat-like appearance while walking at Madison Square Park. She formulated a "$100 million idea" of an animated squirrel-rat hybrid character that ends up in "wacky adventures" and is targeted for child audiences, comparing its potential value to that of Disney's Mickey Mouse. She was hoping that her idea would be used in mainstream media, hiring a lawyer to apply for an intent-to-use trademark for "Sqrat" and recruiting her friend Peter Levine to create concept art for it on a banner. The furry rodent in question had large buck teeth and a poofy tail. Iris Cole-Hayworth, a former friend of Supersonic, revealed that she was very passionate about her project, gave away merchandise of Sqrat in 1999 and 2000, and even did an interview about her character with CNN in February 2000. Her project at first attracted interest from other people according to 2003 court documents, as the film producer Lou DiBella and the TV director Michael A. Simon commissioned a pilot script by Norah Lally for an animated series about Sqrat, who was potentially to be voiced by the American musician Tommy Lee. However, the two producers could not come to an agreement with Supersonic's lawyer and father Jerome Silberstein, resulting in the project's cancellation. Afterward, Supersonic discussed an animated web series for Sqrat for the internet company Urban Box Office Network but rejected their $50,000 offer because she felt that her concept was worth "7 figures". Later uses Carlos Saldanha, the director of the sequel film Ice Age: The Meltdown, informed Bennet that his involvement in Gone Nutty had helped him to plan out Scrat's personality and role for the sequel. Additionally, he wanted Scrat to play a major role in the overall plot instead of being mostly disconnected segments to the plot of the other main characters. As a result, Saldanha decided that Scrat would be the cause of the glacier meltdowns at the film's beginning. Gone Nutty had also served as a basis for another short film No Time for Nuts, released in 2006 with the theatrical film and also making Scrat the protagonist. He further explained that Scratte was intentionally portrayed as having aesthetic and evolutionary advantages over Scrat including her elegance, calmness, and flight ability. In the later years of Blue Sky Studios, Scrat was referred to as the studio's mascot by both Chris Wedge and Peter de Sève, the latter of whom recognized him as a breakout character. == Appearances ==

Scrat is a major character in the Ice Age franchise since his debut in the 2002 film, relentlessly seeking to retrieve and/or bury his acorn only to be disrupted by external factors and/or personal errors. His storylines in the theatrical films and spinoffs are largely independent of the main "herd" characters like Manny (a mammoth), Sid (a ground sloth), and Diego (Smilodon), although he at times has encountered them and has caused natural disasters that put them in danger. Unlike in the theatrical films, several of the spinoff entries feature him as the protagonist. Ice Age Scrat made his debut in the beginning of the 2002 film Ice Age, in which he traveled across a barren ice landscape to seek a place to bury his acorn. In his burial attempt, he causes a giant fissure to crack, unleashing two avalanches in the process. After narrowly escaping from the avalanches with his acorn, Scrat is accidentally trampled then carried away by multiple animals, indicating a shift in the film's focus towards different characters. Nonetheless, Scrat has sporadically appeared in several scenes including with "The Herd" consisting of Manny, Sid, and Diego, being repeatedly thwarted in his efforts to retrieve or bury his acorn by external factors. The end of the film, occurring 20 thousand years later, features Scrat thawing from ice on a deserted tropical island and coming across a coconut. When he attempts to bury his coconut in the sand, he again causes a giant fissure to crack like on the glaciers in the film's beginning, activating a nearby volcano. Scrat has also appeared in multiple shorts. In Gone Nutty, he stored many acorns for the winter and attempted to forcefully insert one more into his collection. This resulted in his acorn collection falling off a cliff; one acorn collided onto Scrat like a meteor, causing the supercontinent Pangaea to split into different continents. In the second short film No Time for Nuts, Scrat and his acorn both accidentally teleport to different locations at different times as a result of a time machine that he found. Scrat's final appearance in a Blue Sky Studios animation was in a short film that was posted to YouTube from an account named "Finale". In the short's plotline, he comes across an acorn in an open snowy area but is initially wary of danger. He then decided to consume his acorn in peace and hops away, satisfied. Other appearances Scrat has made appearances in video games for the Ice Age franchise. He is one of the playable characters for the 2006 tie-in video game Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, a platformer in which he solves puzzles and collects nuts. Scrat is also the sole protagonist and playable character of his own 2019 video game ''Ice Age: Scrat's Nutty Adventure, in which he seeks to recover his acorn from the Scratazon Temple. He is additionally a playable character for the 2009 tie-in mobile app game for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. He also appears in the mobile games Ice Age Village (2012) and Ice Age Adventure (2014), the former of which involves a mechanic in which the player taps on Scrat to steal his acorns while in a theater playing Scrat clips. Scrat has also been sold as part of official Ice Age'' merchandise such as toys. == Reception ==

, Colombia Since his 2002 debut, Scrat has been the subject of overwhelmingly positive receptions to the point of being a highly popular animated character from the 21st century, with Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today referring to him as the "antithesis" of Mickey Mouse and noting the widespread appeal behind watching Scrat attempt to pursue his acorn and unintentionally altering the world in the process. Another reviewer for the 2006 film, Monterey County Weekly writer Scott Renshaw, wrote that Scrat stood out to him and other people as the "real star of the show", warming them up to the movie's beginning then eventually being a highly entertaining final act to them. He referred to him as the "funniest cartoon character created since the zenith of Chuck Jones" because of the visual slapstick antics he was involved in that were similar to the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoons and American silent film comedy actors like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. He then suggested that Scrat should have more spotlighting from Blue Sky Studios compared to the other main characters of the Ice Age films. The storyboard artist Francis Glebas also compared Scrat to Wile E. Coyote, considering both to be the "perfect cartoon character[s]" because of their linear storylines involving simple goals that end in disaster for both. Scrat was cited by Fox Animation president Vanessa Morrison as being a major factor behind the long-term success of the Ice Age franchise. Several actors of the films, too, had recognized the iconicity of Scrat. John Leguizamo, the voice actor for Sid, felt Scrat's pursuit of his acorn served as an analogy of the pursuit of the American Dream, as both Americans and Scrat keep chasing after what they want but never appreciate what they have. Diego's voice actor, Denis Leary, expressed praise for Scrat being the funniest part of the films and said that he was worthy of his own TV show or movie series. The film historian Leonard Maltin explained that Scrat's pantomime-like behavior, or his expressive behaviors in exchange for lacking dialogue, made him as a character easy to understand and outlined the same kind of Sisyphean obsession that also made Wile E. Coyote cartoons effective in comedy. Wedge, de Sève, and Forte have all acknowledged Scrat's extreme nut obsession representing human persistence and struggle, with Forte comparing him to the comic strip character Charlie Brown failing repeatedly to kick the football; Anna Menta of Decider described Scrat as being the "absolutely the best part" of Ice Age and the "true hero" of the film, starting from its introduction scene that made him relatable to her. She likened him to the Greek mythological character Tantalus because of their desires being forever out of reach, making Scrat a "tragic" character. Similarly, Parth Thaker and his fellow co-authors for Journal of Science & Popular Culture saw Scrat's irrational behaviors plus accidental individual ability to engineer his surroundings as being sources of humor to audiences that also highlight the impact of human destruction on their environments. Scrat's actions in the second film, they said, was one instance of the theme of global warming being highlighted (the others being a Palaeotherium couple arguing about the weather and an armadillo trying to profit from climate change). The English professor Thomas Strychacz noted the creativity of Scrat's misadventures, calling them "funny, manic, and fantastic". He offered his socioeconomic interpretation that Scrat's acorn obsession is of a primal nature in which he hoards his acorn that is almost neither safety stored nor exchanged to other characters. Hence as part of the Hobbesian philosophical model in which humans naturally fight each other for their own interests, Scrat as a result ends up in battles with other characters such as Sid for his acorn due to his primal sense of competition for resources. Robert Pitman of Screen Rant, calling Scrat "''Ice Age's'' most iconic character", spoke highly of Blue Sky Studio's decision to allow him to eat his acorn successfully after having failed to for much of the studio's lifetime, considering it a perfect end to the company, the Ice Age franchise, and Scrat's story. As a result, he expressed concern that the upcoming film Ice Age 6 was going to nullify the personal closure that the studio's animators created for Scrat and suggested that another character replace him instead. Despite not being based on any real-life animal species, Scrat has been compared to multiple extinct taxa taxonomically classified to the clade Cynodontia that were first described after the 2002 film. The early shrew-sized mammal Cronopio dentiacutus, which lived in the late Cretaceous of South America, has been noted by the paleontologist Guillermo Rougier as being superficially similar to Scrat because of its long fangs, extended snout, and large eyes and therefore attesting to high ancient mammal form diversity. The small-sized mammal relative Pseudotherium argentinus, which lived in South America during the Triassic, also resembled Scrat because of its long and flat snout and long fangs according to the paleontologist Ricardo Martínez. == References ==