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Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
PLOT Global Warming. Its all over the news, its our fault, right? No, at least, not this time. Hot lava from the core of the earth is rising to the surface, heating things.
In Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, everything is melting and there is too much water around; floods on an enormous scale loom. The only chance for Sid, Manny, and Diego (all recurring characters from the first movie) and all the other creatures to survive is to travel miles away from their homes, to a 'boat' at the end of the valley. In a desperate exodus, everyone sets off with their homes and their children, in a procession to the boat. Along the way, Sid, Manny and Diego meet a family of possums - Crash, Eddie, and their 'sister' Ellie. To everyone on the outside, Ellie is a mammoth, but she's convinced she's a possum. Manny's attempts to convince her of this fact causes their new found friendship to fall apart and arguments begin. They all realise though, the only way to survive is to set aside their differences and work together as a group.
Of course,
running alongside and interspersed with this story is Scat and his eternal quest to keep that nut!
OPINION The first Ice Age was a fantastic movie and it was going to take quite a feat for a sequel for the second movie to draw close to it. I believe Ice Age 2 has achieved that.
The world of Ice Age 2 is much larger than that from the first movie. Also in the first movie, everything was quite uniform: the ice age was still going strong and everything was ice and snow. In this movie, the animators had to contend with lakes, grass, mud, trees, flowers.... everything that would begin to grow once the ice left. Listening to the animator commentary, they say that some of the backgrounds are matte painted rather than being computer animated. This wasn't even something I'd noticed until they said it, but that just shows how flawlessly the combination of matte and animation has been done.
To fill this new world, there are a lot of new characters and species - including some 'bad guys' as dinosaur-type creatures freed from being frozen in the ice. Some of the new species are quite strange (and you have to wonder whether they existed in that form at that time) but they all fit in nicely and come together to make a great community you can envisage Diego, Manny and Sid living in.
The movie has great animation, although some of the effects aren't perfect. In a movie called 'the meltdown' there has to be a lot of water, but unfortunately this is one of the effects that let the movie down for me. It just looks too static - even when its a rapidly moving river, it looked static. The animals are well animated, and done in the greatest detail - if you watch closely, every strand of fur moves on its own. I like the way the animals look and move in ways that are anatomically correct, rather than doing things that are too extreme to be believed.
Like in the first movie, the cast is fantastic. The voices all fit so well with the characters and bring a lot to them. As well as the likes of Ray Romano (Manny), John Leguizamo (Sid), and Denis Leary (Diego) from the first movie, The Meltdown features the voices of Queen Latifah as Ellie and Seann William Scott and Josh Peck as the possum brothers.
There are some scenes that may be scary to younger kids, mostly involving the 'bad guys' who swim around in the ocean with big pointy teeth! These moments are relieved by comedic ones which raises the mood out of scary again.
DVD FEATURES Commentary with the Director (Carlos Saldanha): while this does provide some nice insights into the making of the movie, being only one guy speaking for the entire length of the movie it gets slightly monotonous. I prefer when there are two or more makers speaking, and they play off each other. That said, I don't like commentaries where there are too many people, and you lose track of who is speaking. Commentary with the Creators: this commentary has simply too many people - 11!
During these two commentaries, they mention various scenes that got cut/ drastically changed. I would have liked to have seen these scenes as bonus features on the DVD, but alas they are not there.
'No Time For Nuts': This is an awesome little feature purely about Scat. He finds a time machine and his quest to keep the nut goes through several of the important dates in history. Its very funny and great to watch.
Quiz: A strange quiz asking questions like 'how many times is Sid's name mentioned in the movie?' which is almost always down to guess work rather than observation like it claims. While it should have been fun in theory, I found the questions too obscure.
OVERALL While the movie does have a slight feel of "we're making this to make more money after the first being such a success", the story is original and engaging, and follows on (more or less) from the first. The cast is loveable as always and will have you laughing out loud for large portions of the movie's 90minutes
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Your favorite sub-zero heroes are back for another incredible adventure in the super-cool ... more
sequel to the global hit comedy Ice Age!The action heats up - and so does the temperature - for Manny, Sid, Diego, and Scrat. Trying to escape the valley to avoid...
![Ice Age 2 : The Meltdown [2006] [DVD]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/78482100.jpg "Ice Age 2 : The Meltdown [2006] [DVD]")
![Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2 Disc) [2006] Limited Edition [DVD]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/78373264.jpg "Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2 Disc) [2006] Limited Edition [DVD]")
Feb 15th, 2007
(Feb 17th, 2007)
very helpful by (100%):
