With most animated franchises running on empty by the third outing (Shrek III anyone?) it’s refreshing to report that the Ice Age series shows no sign of thawing.

The strangest herd in natural history – two loved-up mammoths, an accident-prone sloth, a domesticated sabre-toothed tiger and a couple of jive-talkin’ possums -  are still on the road.

But this time they’re awaiting a new arrival – Manny (Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) are expecting the patter of tiny mammoth hooves…and it’s not going down well in some quarters.

Sabre-toothed Diego (Leary) feels he’s “losing his edge” and wants to cut loose while Sid is under the impression that his rag-tag family will never be the same again.

So it’s with a gleeful sense of fate that he discovers a trio of gigantic eggs buried deep below the snowfield. Gathering up the newly-hatched dino-chicks, he unwisely installs himself as their surrogate parent. Big mistake.

Inevitably, their mum, quite a few tons of unhappy dinosaur , tracks them down and carts the baby dinosaurs – plus Sid – off to a vast subterranean world straight out of Journey To The Centre of the Earth.

The Ice Age animators, who have always successfully managed to reinvent the series with each fresh instalment -  expand their considerable range with this third offering.

The herd – hot on the trail of Sid– enter a magnificent yet threatening world of  carnivorous plants (Manny and Diego have a gooey run-in with a vast relative of a Venus Fly-Trap), deadly lava flows and packs of marauding prehistoric creatures.

Yet while it’s stunning looking and visually inventive, the film-makers also maintain the scale, introducing Simon Pegg’s Buck, one-eyed, dinosaur-hunting weasel, owing a major debt to Indiana Jones in the process.

Children familiar with the characters won’t be disappointed and there’s enough to occupy the parents, not least the references to classics such as The Lost World.

Tim Evans