The Quest for Safety and Acorns

Rating: 8/10 (3 April 2006)

Scrat, the little squirrel, is the bookend of ICE AGE and ICE AGE 2: THE MELTDOWN which opened this past Friday in American theatres. His isolated storyline is the one thing that I enjoyed because it has the unpredictability of a hairpin plot and the visual craziness of a Rube Goldberg sequence and is right at the center of the real action.
This time lapse is one of the few complaints that I can have in this latest movie, but again, being a film aimed at children and young adults, no one is up for the count. No humans cross the path of the story. All ICE AGE is, is the story of just that: the warming of the Earth, the end of the idyllic valley where all these different animals co-exist in happy harmony, and the search for a boat that rests at the other end of the valley and will offer a place for them to weather the flood about to ensue. (It's an irony that Scrat is the one who first encounters the melting of the ice in his hilarious opening sequence.) Manny is still pining for his family and feels lonely despite his friends. This doesn't last long: soon he meets a female mammoth named Ellie (voiced by Queen Latifah)... but there's a "mild" problem. She thinks she's a possum. Her two possum "brothers" don't deny it. Diego and Sid think she's not all there but encourage their acquaintance, while Manny wonders if this eccentric mammoth might be for him. In Sid's words, "She's two tons of fun and you're no fun at all." ICE AGE 2 makes its point to include the outsider who is really an insider in its plot. It's made the news dozens of times -- an animal of one breed adopting one of a totally different breed -- and here, Ellie eventually learns the reason she behaves like a possum in a very moving sequence not unlike Manny's in the first and I would like to see anyone who won't shed a tear watching her as a young mammoth finding her surrogate family and her own adopted identity. Even then, she's okay with that -- she is happy about herself. Manny, however, is not; he is a conformist who can't see that this bright thing stomping around the woods and being as carefree as you like it is more herself than he himself might be. No wonder he looks into his own reflection: there is the notion that when finding love, one looks into what reflects you. Ellie definitely complements him... but he cannot see it. Yet.
Global warming is now the omnipresent villain. A reality today, ICE AGE remains contemporary despite its setting and brings forth the moral of what may happen if the Earth's poles melt. Everywhere they go there are signs of warming: geysers explode from the inside of the Earth, water rises dramatically, the dam retaining the ocean of water just behind it is about to give way. Water, water, everywhere, and nasty fishes await their moment.
ICE AGE 2 is a good sequel. Visually it's beautiful and almost life-like and the great care of constructing the universe in which Manny and his friends live shows. One minor complaint is one which has them on their exodus, crossing what seems to be hills, only to then shift inexplicably to ice again, which to me seems to be only to add tension to these shark-like fishes who are looking for meat and to put Diego the saber-toothed tiger into his own worst fears. Then again, this is a animated movie and in following with traditions, the main characters have to travel through danger and be in danger before being in safety and in this it is effective.
Overall I enjoyed it (or let's say, the kid in me did), but any adults looking for an adult story should go elsewhere because despite the material, it's not here. A dance sequence was the high point (children in the theater cheered it and laughed at its surprising denouement), and the vulture's quest for raw meat, complete with a Broadway-esquire musical, is a riot. And of course, it ends appropriately with Scrat in acorn heaven, being pulled back to Earth, and incorporated into the main story.