Scrat Gets The Acorn in Bittersweet Final Piece of Animation from Blue Sky Studios Artists

In a bittersweet video posted by a small team of artists at the defunct Blue Sky Studios, Scrat from the Ice Age films finally gets his acorn, marking the last piece of animation from the studio.

What’s Happening:

While yesterday we saw the debut of the last major project from Blue Sky Studios, Ice Age Scrat Tales, which saw its premiere directly on Disney+, another more somber video hit the internet around the same time.
In that video, dubbed “The End” on a YouTube channel simply called “Finale,” an unlisted video reportedly made by artists at the shuttered animation house is the last piece of animation created by Blue Sky Studios.
In the 30-second shot, we see Scrat, iconic to Blue Sky’s most popular franchise, Ice Age, finally get the acorn he has been chasing after in numerous films and shorts and enjoy his meal before the camera fades to black.
The caption to the posted video reads “In the final days of Blue Sky Studios, a small team of artists came together to do one final shot. This shot is a farewell, a send-off on our own terms.”

When The Walt Disney Company acquired 20th Century Fox back in 2019, Disney also acquired Blue Sky Studios. In February of 2021, it was announced that the Connecticut-based Animation house would be closing that April. At the time, Ice Age projects had already been announced though we didn’t know to what level they had been completed.
Now, almost a year after that day, the debut of their last major project, Ice Age Scrat Tales, has occurred and the artists posted their clip with the beloved character who made his debut twenty years earlier in 2002.
A feature film, Nimona, that was currently in progress at the studio and slated for release this year still reportedly had over 10 months of work left before it would be complete. The film, which followed a young shape-shifter who teams up with a mad scientist named Lord Ballister Blackheart to expose the ruler of the kingdom, has been picked up by Netflix, and is now set to debut in 2023.
Interestingly, the posted video is titled “The End” and the last short in the Scrat Tales series is titled “Nut The End.” While we think we see the conclusion of Scrat’s Tale, we don’t and the series leaves the possibility of a return, though given this short clip, it seems unlikely but not entirely out of the realm of possibility. It would simply be handed to a different studio, similar to another entry in the Ice Age saga, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild.