![]() The animals eventually head for a huge tree trunk that will float them to safety, mixing Ark mythology with Adam and Eve connotations. The “Ice Age 2” writing crew stacks up a load of allusions like so many ice blocks. The silence is eventually broken with a good joke, as she warns a romantic Manny, “You’re not saving the species tonight, or any other night.” ![]() The moment Ellie realizes she’s a mammoth is filled with refreshing quiet. Wedges and Saldanha co-directed the first installment, and Saldanha takes over for “Meltdown.” He shows an agreeable touch at key moments, especially given the nonstop jabbering that clutters most animated films these days. Long-suffering Manny must be patient in pulling the wool from her eyes. Manny, who fears his species is going extinct, wants a date.Įnter Latifah as Ellie, a mammoth who was raised by possums and thinks she should hang her 5-ton frame upside down from trees. Diego, afraid of the water, wants courage. Sid, the butt of all jokes, wants respect. Like all good animations aimed at 6-year-olds, “Meltdown” poses teachable moments for each of our main characters. As the fleeing animals confront the villainous reptiles, “Ice Age 2” becomes a mash-up of “Exodus” and “Jaws.” These new inventions are rendered in brilliant computer animation, leaping and hissing through water and air. A sea of water waits behind the dam when warmer weather opens the glacier, the valley is doomed.Ī couple of voracious reptiles, meanwhile, lurk in the waters crisscrossing the snowbound valley. While prehistoric penguins, turtles and bears play in the melting snow as if it were Jurassic Water Park, Manny, Sid and Diego climb the ice cliff to discover stark reality. Our main characters live in a valley below a towering ice dam. The glorious and treacherous world of snow they built for “Ice Age” is coming apart. Scrat is back, in all his hopeless glory, climbing his own tongue hand over hand, plugging holes in ice dams, using his teeth like a glass cutter – anything to attack another acorn. Manny the mammoth even has a potential love interest, voiced by Queen Latifah.Īnd yet it’s all just so much stuffing for the snowman. ![]() Romano and Leguizamo are back, Denis Leary returns as sensitive saber-tooth Diego. Now comes the sequel, “Ice Age 2: The Meltdown,” and the more things thaw, the more they stay the same. Let’s say glaciers did cover most of the planet – wouldn’t we all struggle as comically and maniacally as poor Scrat to scrape one last acorn out of the permafrost? With his googly eyes and suicidal lack of self-regard, the wordless Scrat of a thousand desperate grunts was an animated Marty Feldman. Scrat, the acorn-obsessed squirrel rat, was the true charm of the 2002 original “Ice Age.” Yes, Ray Romano nicely transferred his sitcom persona to a woolly mammoth, and John Leguizamo brought his voice talents to Sid the sloth.īut it was Scrat, who began in a short film and whose antics were scattered throughout the first “Ice Age,” who made audiences laugh in hysterical sympathy. The “Ice Age” movie franchise is in reality a fantastic short film stretched by a couple of hours of filler.
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