Anyone who remembers Raquel Welch's sexy fur bikini from "One Million Years B.C." may conclude that the major human evolution between then and "10,000 B.C." was a sad loss of fashion sense.

"10,000 B.C." introduces us to a hardscrabble group of mastodon hunters shivering on the snow-swept steppes of a receding ice age. They are a funky looking lot, sporting dreadlocks while buried in furs and caked-on ceremonial face-paint that would have the make-up artists from "Dances with Wolves" laughing with derision.

This matters. "10,000 B.C.," it turns out, is as much a teen romance as a CG animation fantasy, and its attractive young stars - most notably the beautiful, but not terribly emotive, Camilla Belle - are hard to identify under all this stuff.

Belle plays Evolet, an orphan who is discovered by the tribe and taken in as an oracle for the tribe's destiny. The warrior who wins her hand is foretold to deliver the tribe from its dreary circumstances.

Before this can come to pass, slave traders from some mysterious civilization in the south kidnap Evolet. One of Evolet's suitors, D'Leh (Steven Strait) strikes out to retrieve her. With a small band of friends he tracks his love down from the snowfields through jungles and deserts, surviving close encounters with a saber-toothed tiger and the occasional carnivorous ostrich.

For the rest of its running time, "10,000 B.C." plays out like an "Apocalypto" for the comic-book set.

The bad guys are a pyramid-building civilization, with cartoonish priests who are looking for cheap labor and a few good candidates for human sacrifice. Unfortunately, Evolet, with her piercing blue eyes, ends up slated for the latter.

There is one silver lining in this unhappy course of events. As the temperature rises, the furs and face-paint come off and Evolet can fully radiate as the object of beauty that drives D'Leh onward.

Every CG animated blockbuster needs a handful of eye-popping set pieces to make its mark. "10,000 B.C." manages to muster one.

There is something wonderfully loopy about captured mastodons dragging stone blocks up the sides of pyramids under construction. It makes for a satisfying moment of comic book kitsch and is our best reward for following D'Leh's sluggish trek after Evolet.

Beyond the nameless animation artists who plopped those mastodons on the pyramids, nobody in "10,000 B.C." seems to be bringing their "A" game. This is a film that sputters rather than soars. None of the actors are particularly strong and they get little help from the script. In the best comic book tradition, the writers of "10,000 B.C." are willing to throw narrative momentum overboard whenever they spot a chance to stop the action for some dramatic pose. On the other hand, with a plotline that is clich