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.
(Please note that there ARE spoilers for the movie
throughout this review. After all, how
can you review a movie if you can’t say something about it? If you’re one of those people who can’t stand
knowing anything about a movie before you go see it, go read one of the many
other fine articles on SearchWarp.com. Otherwise, let’s continue!)
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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