Should have been kept straightforward and moral-free.

Rating: 6/10 (16 July 2006)

I don't know if I should feel guilty or not for admitting this, but Ice Age is possibly the funniest film I have ever seen. Let me clarify: I don't just mean funny-in-a-cute-and-nicely-animated kind of way, but actually hysterical and hilarious enough to rival any live-action comedy.
What made Ice Age such a brilliant film was its lack of Disney morals and cheesy family clichés. It had no morals to preach, no statements to make and no lessons to teach. It was just a simple, straightforward adventure with huge doses of well-placed comedy. Clearly, the filmmakers at Blue Sky Studios did not realize this was the root of the success of the first film, because in Ice Age 2: The Meltdown morals and romantic troubles are suddenly there to complicate things. I found this endlessly disappointing.
The main plot is still a simple one; as the trio and the rest of the animals are enjoying the increasingly hot climate of the Ice Age, they are warned by some kooky prophet-like turtle that all the sun is causing the ice caps above their valley to melt. Realising their entire habitat is about to flood, Sid, Diego and Manny set out to reach other side of the valley where a boat awaits to take the animals away from the great flood. This is where the storyline should have ended because it's entertaining enough for an animated feature. But no, instead sub-plots are introduced in the form of new MAIN characters that they encounter on their journey.
This is none other than Queen Latifah. Her character as the female mammoth who doesn't know she is a mammoth was atrocious. I despise the need for introducing a character like this when you already had a perfectly dynamic trio. Yes, she had some good lines and the relationship she had with the other characters occasionally provided for comedy but generally, she was pretty much as annoying as Jar-Jar Binks. She brought nothing to this film other than complex love troubles. She was the fifth wheel.
Picking up on the enormous positive response from Scrat in the last film, this little prehistoric rodent is given much more screen time than before. This is essentially the best part of Ice Age 2 and the animations on his gags are some of the best and funniest I have ever seen. Scrat's life still revolves around finding and keeping that one nut and this is great. Nothing has changed and everything still works. Scrat's whole storyline actually works better in The Meltdown than it did in the first film because it is so straightforward and therefore easy to improve with the simplest of new funny scenarios.
Yes, Ice Age: The Meltdown is still a funny film but loses a lot of its blatant humour to make room for a new storyline, that of Manny and his new female mammoth. It does not work as well as the first one because it isn't as simplistic. 6/10