Manny, Sid and Diego return but having made it through the big freeze can they survive the big melt? This time our intrepid trio are joined by two opossums Crash and Eddie plus Ellie, a mammoth who thinks she’s an opossum.
The presence of a female mammoth adds a touch of romance for Manny, while Sid the sloth becomes an object of worship as the fire-king by a pack of mini-sloths. Sadly Diego the sabre-toothed tiger, one of the highlights of the first film, is underused. In the original the character had a little bit of an edge, we weren’t sure if he was a good guy or a bad guy, but now he’s firmly in the hero camp. So in place of that slyness we have a cute cuddly cat who’s afraid of the water.
As with the first film it’s Scrat, the sabre-toothed squirrel who provides the film’s funniest moments. In fact there are probably more laughs in the six minute Scrat short No Time for Nuts than there are in the entire running time of Ice Age 2.
The films not without its fun moments though and we get at least one memorable new character in Fast Tony, a giant armadillo, voiced by Jay Leno. He’s a bit of a wheeler-dealer, always on the make, and he adds a touch of slightly more adult humour to proceedings.
From a technical standpoint the film is a definite improvement over its predecessor. In the four years between the two computer animation has come a long way, most notably in the rendering of fur, with Scrat’s tail looking far more hairy.
As always Hollywood feels the need to push a franchise until it bursts and there’s an Ice Age 3 in the works but the writers need to come up with something a little more interesting than just another journey story to keep these animals from becoming extinct.
