Ice Age: The Meltdown – Cooler Than the Original
Posted: Wednesday, April 05, 2006
by Danny Davids
Let’s get one thing straight right now: I love animation. I watch Saturday morning cartoons, and I don’t have kids or grandkids I can blame it on. I have no problem sitting down to watch “Jimmy Neutron", “Fairly Oddparents", and “Danny Phantom" on Nickelodeon, or “Teen Titans" and “Codename: Kids Next Door" on Cartoon Network. I am a huge fan of computer-generated animation, as long as there’s a decent plot. (Basically that means that if the artwork is great and the storyline stinks, I’m out.) And one of my all-time favorite movies of any type is – care to take a guess? – “Ice Age". So maybe you’ll understand why I was willing to brave hordes of crying, whining, yapping children (and their parents!) to see the sequel, “Ice Age: The Meltdown" on its opening weekend.
For those who never saw the first movie, “Ice Age" is a Pleistocene-era version of “Three Men and a Baby." Manny the mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (voiced by John Leguizamo), and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (voiced by Denis Leary) face avalanches, freezing blizzards, and underground ice caves to return a human baby to its tribe. Yet all is not as it seems on this journey of good Samaritans. Diego is a mole, trying to guide the group to his pack of fellow “sabers", where they’ll end up dining on all three unsuspecting victims. Circumstances have a way of changing hearts, though, and Diego ends up helping his new “pack" escape the other sabertooths, nearly costing him his life. (On the director commentary that is included with the DVD, director Chris Wedge states that originally Diego was to have died. Fortunately wiser heads prevailed, and Diego is shown limping into the final scenes, a true member of his new “pack".) Threaded throughout the movie are the comic-relief sequences featuring Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel who pops in at the most unlikely times, trying to catch the acorn that keeps getting away. It was thoroughly enjoyable and did extremely well at the box office, grossing over $176 million in the US.
The sequel picks up some time after the first movie. We’re not sure exactly how much time has passed, but suffice it to say that things are a bit less icy than they were the first time we met our trio. In fact, they’re becoming downright balmy. The ice is melting, threatening to flood the valley where our heroes have made their new home along with a host of other avian and mammalian creatures. So our intrepid trio take off with the rest of the fauna, looking for a rumored boat that will rescue them from the flood. Along the way they meet a few new friends, make a few new enemies, and learn some new things about each other. And of course Scrat pops up periodically throughout the movie, chasing down that still-elusive acorn.
For me, the best parts of this sequel were the references to the original movie. I was afraid the writers would take the jokes from “Ice Age" and just do them over again. Instead, they took the funny parts of the first movie and reworked them, paying homage to the original while taking the humor in a different direction. The epitome of this is when Sid learns he is the “Fire God" of a tribe of sloths. How appropriate is this? After all, he “discovered" fire in the first movie and even called himself “Lord of the Flame." Other examples are more like episodes of déjà vu than direct copies. Manny battles a prehistoric version of a crocodile/alligator, and in the end tosses it back into the water, much as he tossed the rhinoceros in the original “Ice Age". Diego nearly fell into a volcano in the first movie, and was rescued by Manny lending a helping hand (or in this case, trunk). In the sequel, he leaps off a falling rock and nearly tumbles into a gaping chasm, but is saved again by a couple of helping trunks.
No, Manny didn’t evolve a second trunk. There’s another mammoth in “Meltdown", voiced by Queen Latifah. Ellie thinks she’s a possum because she was befriended by a possum family at a very young age, and now hangs (literally!) with her two “brothers", Crash and Eddie. The two possum brothers provide some outlandish slapstick comedy, getting laughs even from the adults in the audience. Manny and Ellie end up doing the on again/off again relationship, and in one hilarious scene a misunderstanding about what’s involved in perpetuating the species sent everyone in the theater into peals of laughter. Sid spends most of the movie trying to play matchmaker to the two mammoths (when he’s not trying to avoid being sacrificed to a volcano), and Diego finds himself the grumpy babysitter, first to the kids in Sid’s camp, then to the two possums (you gotta love the “Whack-a-Mole" scene!), and of course always to Sid. However, we find out that our calm, cool, and collected saber has a deep-seated fear of…aw, but I wouldn’t want to tell you everything, would I?
As far as the computer-generated artwork itself, there’s obvious improvement over the original. Animal fur and feathers look more realistic. Facial expressions seem to stand out a little more. Motions are more fluid (no pun intended). The reflections of light and shadow on the ice and in the water are simply awesome. And the final few climactic scenes had me actually holding my breath. The overall look is simply beautiful.
I had high expectations for this movie, and I was not disappointed. Don’t think this is a movie for kids only. There’s enough humor for adults to enjoy as well. And it’s a great way for the family to spend a few hours together. Now that I’ve seen the movie, all I have left to do is suffer in silence until “Ice Age: The Meltdown" comes out on DVD, and then I’ll be in line adding it to my movie collection!
Additional sources for this article include The Numbers and the Ice Age and Ice Age: The Meltdown Web sites.
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