Ice Age 2: The Meltdown

It might be because I grew up on a diet of Chuck Jones’s hilariously anarchic ‘Roadrunner’ cartoons, but I find the similarly styled computer-animated works coming out of Blue Sky Studio (‘Ice Age’, ‘Robots’) to be just as funny and brimming with imaginative characters and charismatic voiceovers. But I think I’ve been overruled on this one by the trio of kids who accompanied me to the screening. Simply put, all three felt it was too repetitive, overly splintered in terms of structure and simply not funny enough. I agree on the first two points, but not about the humour, which I thought was mostly spot on (one can only deduce that some of the Chuck Jones-style jokes flew over the kids’ heads).

Once again, we’re back in an early evolutionary phase of a planet inhabited by a mishmash of supposedly semi-prehistoric creatures. Unfortunately, the ice age is drawing to a close and, in an overly obvious reference to global warming, the ice cliffs holding back the sea are beginning to melt. Unless the populace starts a mass migration, their utopia will turn turtle. In the thick of it are the film’s three intrepid leads: Manny, the soft-spoken mammoth (who thinks he’s the last of his species); Sid, the comical sloth; and Diego, the sabre-toothed tiger; while, somewhere on the periphery, is that squirrel-like creature with an acorn fixation (who provides the biggest laughs). Certainly, the storyline wanes towards the end and, from the kids’ point of view, the whole package lacks momentum. Which is why they’ve threatened me with violence if I give it more than three stars. So I won’t.