Although Ice Age: The Meltdown soared to the top of the box office when it opened the last week in March, it has received mixed, even unfavorable reviews.
The story is a tale of Manny the Wooly Mammoth, voiced by Ray Ramano, looking for love as the Ice Age comes to an end. The other major characters from the first film make it to the second: Sid the sloth and Diego the saber-toothed lion.
Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times felt, “The animation is uninspired (with so much ice, the creatures need to be twice as good-looking), and the story is humdrum.” When the arctic animals see their world melting, they migrate to a huge boat at the other side of the valley. Although it is very biblical, it does not make for an exciting storyline.
Manny’s second quest as he crosses the valley is to find another of his kind, ends up meeting Ellie, voiced by Queen Latifah, a mammoth who thinks she’s a possum. Her character and their relationship provokes some laughs, but the one layered jokes and puns do not live up to other Pixar greats whose plots offer implied reading for many different age groups.
Not to give away the end of the movie, but they reach the great arc, the valley fills with water, an ice wall breaks, the water level recedes and everyone lives. There are two major problems with this ending: first, it completely avoids the issue of global warming and second, it is a lie. Everyone knows what happened in reality: wooly mammoths are extinct now. So shouldn’t Manny have missed the boat and drowned? Morbid, yes, but much more realistic than the sickly-happy ending in the movie.
To warrant the film praise where it’s due, there were entertaining moments and characters. Those who have seen the first Ice Age will remember Scrat the squirrel as one of the better characters. Ty Burr from The Boston Globe said, “The funniest — by a long shot — is Scrat, the prehistoric squirrel whose silent, increasingly desperate attempts to retrieve a precious acorn are dropped into the movie like “Road Runner” shorts into a Cecil B. DeMille epic.” Something has to be said about the fact that Scrat, a meaningless character to the resolution, may be the most interesting character in the movie.
Ice Age: The Meltdown can be summed up as a cute kid’s movie, but nothing more. There are no witty one-liners for the different age groups to hold on to, a quality most have come to expect from animated movies. Every character is flat and the story is not realistic. After seeing it once, there is no need to rewind.