A good sequel

Rating: 6/10 (3 April 2006)

This film is a good sequel, but it never quite reaches the cracking fun heights of its forebear. Our previous heroes are all there, along with a few new ones, but I didn't find myself bonding much to the new characters.
Scrat-the-Squirrel is as ever hilarious, but he's more obviously used as patched-in scenes to liven up the otherwise rather slow pace of the film. I felt that if you put all the Scrat sequences together you'd have an excellent short! Technically the graphics are very good, and it must have taken a deliberate effort to preserve the slightly dated style of the previous film. However, CPUs must have been humming to process every droplet as water splashes are clearly the big innovation for this movie.
Kids will love the film and burst out laughing at the slapstick humour, parents will sit through it painlessly enough, enjoying a few more subtle jokes, but overall Ice Age "The Meltdown" doesn't quite live up to the very high expectations of folk who've seen the first film.