C

The third “Ice Age” movie is the first in the increasingly popular 3-D mode. It doesn’t use the format nearly as subtly as “Coraline” or “Up” have, and it doesn’t match them for subtlety in other ways, either. While both those pictures proved that 3D animated movies might represent intelligent, imaginative storytelling that could appeal equally to children and adults, this new “Ice Age” goes a pure kiddie route, as the subtitle indicates. After all, kids love dinosaurs, don’t they? (Even if to some the beasts seem so last century, pop-culture-wise.) So why not just shoehorn them into the template of the previous installments? That’s essentially that “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” does, and it’s a tactic that will probably keep the franchise humming along profitably, despite its persistent mediocrity.

The focus once again is on the trio of woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), saber-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary) and sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), but each of them has new concerns. Manny’s wife Ellie (Queen Latifah) is pregnant, and Diego is scared that he’s becoming a wuss. Sid, meanwhile, adopts three baby dinos that hatch from eggs he stumbles upon—which causes trouble when their mother emerges from her underground lair looking for them. In the ensuing melee she makes off with them but Sid as well, forcing Manny, Diego and Ellie to follow them to the “land of the lost” below, where dinosaurs and other supposedly extinct creatures dwell. They’re joined by Ellie’s possum “brothers,” Crash (Seann William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck), and eventually by a crazy weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg) that lives in the underworld and becomes their guide and wacky helper.

What follows is a chain of fast-paced adventure episodes with lots of menacing dinos, hair’s-breadth escapes and wild rides. They’re animated well enough, and the 3D adds a sense of added excitement, but after a while they grow pretty repetitious, and the dialogue accompanying them is, to be charitable, pretty juvenile. Periodically interrupting the mayhem are scenes with Scrat, the acorn-loving rodent that’s also fallen under the ice. Their dependence on old Road Runner routines is even more obvious than in the first two installments, but this time around a Pepe Le Pew element is added in the form of a female Scrat with whom he battles over an acorn but also becomes romantically involved. As in the earlier pictures, the pop culture references that fill many other cartoons nowadays to amuse parents are largely missing here; there are nods to “The Flintstones” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” but those are obviously aimed at the kids. And when the height of inspiration in them is a line like “Don’t ever yabba dabba doo that again,” you know we’re not talking heavy satire.

The voice work is adequate, with Leguizamo again the standout among the regular cast, and strong support coming from the manic Pegg, and the computer animation is up to the standard of previous installments, with the 3D adding the usual extra punch to the images. But while the “Ice Age” movies have never been terrible, they’ve never soared very high either, and this one is no better than a run-of-the-mill child-friendly toon. That will probably be enough to get it a pass from tolerant family audiences, but not much more.