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Ice Age: The Meltdown April 9, 2006 |
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I’ve made clear in the past my recent hatred of what I like to call, and what I believe I rightfully coined and own all copyrights on, the Talking Animal Syndrome, which is just what is sounds like, bad movies with talking animals that shouldn’t be talking, let alone taking up my precious time in movie theaters. Movies like “Chicken Little”, “Doogal”, “Valiant”, or a derivative of the syndrome, “Robots”, are examples of nothing more than movie studios flaunting computer technology to try to wow an already wowed out and weary audience with new animation and hackneyed characters for that one big weekend score at the box office, hoping, as an added bonus, that the script is actually smart enough to draw comparisons with classics of the genre like “Shrek”, and “Toy Story”, but are usually well below the mighty standards of such masterpieces. These movies do make money, so I don’t see a future where the Talking Animal Syndrome will suddenly become extinct, like the ancient talking Dodo, I actually see it becoming more prevalent as desperate studios mired in this now two-years long box office funk look for a quick franchise fix, pawning off spewing pigs and chickens on computer nerds who mold them to fit the human-like characterizations of celebrity vocal talent celebrating the easy pay checks they receive for this kind of work, but or all that is bad about this CGI trend in lame animal movies (and it’s not unique to CGI, it’s been a standard since the dawn of animation, but it’s just more annoying now), every so often one comes along with just enough humor, character likeability, and genuine warmth to overcome the trappings of the TAS, and most recently the only one to do so is the current box office champ, “Ice Age: The Meltdown”, a sequel that, if not as good as the original, is just as charming nonetheless. Here finally is a talking animal film made outside of Pixar, the obvious noted kings of the animation world, that gets it right, presents characters that are funny, adorable, and slightly melodramatic, balancing a G-rated sensibility with a grown up sense of danger, living, and friendship. Some of the prehistoric jokes may be straight out of any old ‘Flintstones’ episode, but we’ll suffer some stale humor for a tightly paced adventure comedy that hardly ever has to rely on crassness to please it’s young audience, and their obliging guardians. As the title suggests, the plot of this sequel to the 2002 Oscar nominated “Ice Age” concerns the period in which the entirely frozen tundra that effectively killed off the dinosaurs begins to melt, shifting continents, and making things messy, and potentially life threatening, for the post-Jurassic animals living in the film’s bowl-like valley. We meet up again with the trio of friends from the first film; Diego, a smart and cynical saber-tooth tiger voiced by Dennis Leary, Manny (Ray Romano), a sensitive, nasally woolly mammoth who is mopey because he believes he’s the last mammoth on the plant, and Sid (John Leguizamo), a wise-cracking sloth, the jester of the group who only wants respect from his compadres, but will settle for their company despite it. The plot is basic; to escape the ever melting and flooding valley, the animals have to track miles to a boat shaped ark at the end of the valley, as recently thawed water dinosaurs and ever present vultures wait to pick off those who can’t make the journey alive. “There’s good news,” says the head vulture to the travelers, “the more of you that die, the better I eat.” Along the way, to pad the story, and add poignancy to Manny’s search for his species’ identity, the group meet a girl mammoth named Ellie (Queen Latifah), a dopey beast who was conned as a baby to believe she was a possum, by two mischievous possum brothers who needed the protection, and saw a golden opportunity in the abandoned baby mammoth. Manny is skeptical about pursuing a relationship with a mammoth that believe she’s a rodent, but Diego eggs him on, “she’s not half bad,” he says, “she’s a little confused, but sweet.” Sweet indeed, is what all of these characters are, for there’s something entirely charming, if not exactly true to the code of beasts, about a ferocious saber-tooth tiger bucking up his woolly mammoth best friend and giving him the courage it takes to ask the girl he sort of likes out on a date. The sense of friendship between the characters, how the dim but lovable lisp-talking Sid teaches the water phobic Diego how to swim, the affection Ellie has for her troublemaking possum “brothers”, the way in which Manny slowly begins to grow an attraction for his female counterpart, and the way Scrat, the hilariously twitchy rodent, will go through hell and high water to protect his precious acorn from slipping permanently from his shaky grasp, is what makes the film so enjoyable, and makes the nominal A to B plot tolerable. The animation, of course, is textbook beautiful, especially a moonlit night sequence where the group teeter atop a crumbling rock formation 700 feet above a jaggy cavern, and the voice talent, with supporting work by Seann William Scott as one of the possum brothers, and Jay Leno (yep) as a fast talking shyster bird, is generally effective, but like the original, “Ice Age: The Meltdown” stays afloat due to the sentimentality of the story (Ellie’s childhood abandonment flashback is a tearjerker), and the borderline schmaltzy way in which a tiger, a mammoth, and a sloth genuinely feel about, and protect, each other from their world’s inherent dangers. If more CGI films featured characters like Sid, Manny, Ellie, and Diego, than maybe, in a perfect world, we could do away with the Talking Animal Syndrome once and for all. If that’s not the best compliment I can give the film, than I don’t know what is. “Ice Age: The Meltdown” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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