Mike Thurmeier is a Canadian director, screenwriter, and animator, who works at Blue Sky Studios. He is best known for his work on the Ice Age franchise.

Early Life
Thurmeier was born in 1975 in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He studied at Archbishop M.C. O`Neill High School. During his school days, he decided that he wanted to become a lawyer. However, the Disney animation movie Aladdin released in 1992, during Thurmeier`s last year in school, which inspired him to pursue a career in animation.

Movie Career
Mike Thurmeier soon joined Blue Sky Studios as an animator. He served as an animator (working in the visual effects department) on the hit 1999 live-action film Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The Canadian also worked on the legendary TV show The Sopranos. Thurmeier then moved on to working on animation films with Blue Sky Studios, his first role coming as a supervising animator for the 2002 box office hit Ice Age. The movie is about the plight of a diverse group of animals who try to save themselves from the glaciers threatening to destroy the earth. The success of Ice Age paved the way for numerous sequels, most of which Thurmeier was heavily involved with.

After serving as a supervising animator on the 2005 animation comedy Robots and 2006`s Ice Age: The Meltdown, Mike Thurmeier directed the short film No Time For Nuts, an Ice Age spin-off, which was nominated for an Oscar award in 2007. The following year, he was appointed as a senior supervising animator for Horton Hears a Who!. Mike Thurmeier made his directorial feature debut in the year 2009 with Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. The movie went on earn close to a million dollars worldwide, cementing Mike Thurmeier as a top animated film director. He followed it up three years later with Ice Age: Continental Drift, which was also a mega-hit at the box office. In 2016, Mike Thurmeier, along with debutant director Galen T. Chu, directed the fifth installment in the Ice Age franchise, Ice Age: Collision Course.