Ice Age: The Meltdown

Ice Age: The Meltdown
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Carlos Saldanha
Produced by	Lori Forte Chris Wedge
Written by	Peter Gaulke Gerry Swallow
Starring	Ray Romano John Leguizamo Denis Leary Queen Latifah Jay Leno Seann William Scott Josh Peck Will Arnett
Music by	John Powell
Editing by	Harry Hitner
Studio	Blue Sky Studios
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	March 31, 2006 (2006-03-31)
Running time	91 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$80 million
Box office	$655,388,158

Ice Age: The Meltdown, also known as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown or simply as Ice Age 2, is the 2006 sequel to the 2002 computer-animated film Ice Age. It was produced by Blue Sky Studios for 20th Century Fox, and premiered in Belgium on March 1, 2006. It was eventually released in 70 countries, with the last release being in China, on June 9, 2006. It was directed by Carlos Saldanha, co-director of the original Ice Age, and the music is composed by Robots composer, John Powell. The working title was Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, but for the film's final release, the creators decided to remove the number 2, calling it Ice Age: The Meltdown. However, in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Mexico, and Australia, its title is promoted as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. Also, most of the sponsors of the film had the 2 in their packaging after the name change (they however did edit the 2 out of their TV ads). The Blu-ray Disc and DVD were released in the United States and Canada on November 21, 2006 according to the official web store. They were released in the UK on October 23, 2006, and both include a new Scrat short, No Time for Nuts.

Plot

In the opening scene, Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel climbs a glacier but accidentally opens a hole in it, causing water to spurt out.

The world of ice is slowly melting. The creatures of the Ice Age are all shown enjoying themselves on slides and pools made by the melting ice; among them the three protagonists of the first film: Manny, Sid, and Diego. Sid opens a small day camp, where none of the younger creatures take him seriously, nor do Manny and Diego, which leaves Sid seeking a daring deed. Fast Tony, a local con artist is claiming that the earth will flood and that the bark and reeds which he sells are needed to stay alive. Manny dismisses the idea, but is distracted when he sees that Sid will try to high dive from a giant waterfall; as Manny goes with Diego to the top of the waterfall to save Sid from his act of daredevilry, they see that the pleasant weather has caused the ice shelves to melt, and it is kept from destroying the valley only by the glaciers, which have formed a dam.

A lone vulture warns the animals that a giant tree can act as a boat and save them if they make it to the end of the valley within three days time, and all soon set out to find it. As the animals begin their journey, Sid sings three songs to tease Manny about Mammoths being "extinct". During the evacuation, a glacier which contains two sea reptiles from the Mesozoic era, Cretaceous and Maelstrom, breaks off.

When Manny briefly is separated from them, Diego and Sid encounter two mischievous opossums named Crash and Eddie who drive them nuts by playing whack-a-mole with them. Manny is teased about being the last mammoth alive, but is surprised when he encounters Ellie, a female mammoth who believes she is an opossum and Crash and Eddie's sister. Sid invites her to tag along with the group to escape the flood, and she brings her brothers. After a perilous ordeal with Cretaceous and Maelstrom while crossing a pond, Sid finds out that Diego is afraid of water, prompting him to encourage Diego to admit and face his fears - Diego insists that "fear is for prey", so Sid points out that Diego is behaving as if he is the water's prey. They discover an area which Ellie recalls as the place where she was adopted. She finally realizes she is a mammoth but distances herself from Manny when he suggests "saving their species". Ellie and Manny ultimately make up when they must co-operate to save the group when the ground cracks under their feet. Sid is kidnapped by a tribe of mini-sloths who believe Sid to be a god. Sid lights a fire for them, and believes that he has finally found respect, but they plan to sacrifice him by tossing him into a volcano. Sid narrowly escapes. The next morning, Sid tells the others his experience but none are convinced. They find a field of hot geysers, which separate Manny, Sid, and Diego from Ellie and her brothers.

When the flood comes, Manny saves Ellie from drowning as she is caught in a cave (due to falling rocks), while Diego overcomes his fear of water to save Sid. Cretaceous and Maelstrom arrive, but due to Manny's quick thinking, they are finished off by a rock which falls on them, killing them both. The other animals are at the mercy of the water currents. Meanwhile, Scrat climbs up the glacier and at the top sticks the acorn he has into the ice. This forms a crack in the glacier, which widens into a fissure, diverting the flood and saving the animals. Scrat is then washed away. In the final scene, a herd of mammoths shows up, but Manny and Ellie decide to remain together anyway, taking Sid, Diego, and the opossum brothers along. Sid encounters the mini-sloths again - they believe Sid stopped the flood and invite him to be their leader. Diego, surprised to see the mini-sloths are real, convinces Sid to stay with the others, reluctantly admitting that Sid is a vital part of their 'herd'. The epilogue shows Scrat having a near death experience after falling into the fissure. He enters a heaven full of acorns. Suddenly, he finds himself torn away. He unhappily wakes up, having been resuscitated by Sid, who he proceeds to viciously attack.

Cast

Main article: List of Ice Age characters

• Ray Romano as Manfred "Manny", the woolly mammoth.
• John Leguizamo as Sid, the giant ground sloth.
• Denis Leary as Diego, the Smilodon.
• Chris Wedge as Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel.
• Queen Latifah as Ellie, the woolly mammoth.
• Seann William Scott and Josh Peck as Crash and Eddie, the opossums, respectively.
• Will Arnett as Lone Gunslinger Vulture
• Jay Leno as Fast Tony, the giant armadillo.
• Tom Fahn as Stu, the Glyptodon.
• Alex Sullivan as James, the aardvark.
• Alan Tudyk as Cholly, the chalicothere.

Promotions

• As an additional marketing ploy a special "anti-cell" spot was created with Sid complaining to the audience about a ringing cellular phone. The same was done for Brother Bear, I, Robot, Kung Fu Panda, and Robots.
• On Family Guy's episode "Sibling Rivalry", Scrat is shown trying to take three nuts out of the side of a glacier; Peter shows up and tries to stop him, admonishing the squirrel for stealing, which drives Scrat to subsequently attack Peter. Apart from Peter, the scene was rendered in 3D (Family Guy is normally drawn in 2D), and Scrat was voiced by Chris Wedge who voices him in the films. The episode originally aired the week before the film opened. Fox aired promotions for the film throughout the evening.
• During the same evening of Scrat's Family Guy cameo, Sid was hosting the entire FOX line-up, showing up in intermittent times between commercials.
• Re-edited scenes of Ice Age: The Meltdown were shown in Airhead candy commercials on several kids' channels and programs, such as the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, ABC Kids on ABC, and more. It shows, in part, that after Scrat defeats a school of piranha, he proudly displays an Airhead packet (replaced by an acorn in the actual film), when suddenly an eagle comes over and swipes it from him.
• One of the posters for the film was a parody of an iPod advertisement, with "iAge" replacing "iPod" and an acorn replacing an iPod.

Reception

Critical reception

Ice Age: The Meltdown received mixed to average reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes giving the film a "rotten" rating, with 56% of reviews positive. Its Metacritic score is 58, placing it at the high end of the site's "mixed or average reviews" category. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four.

Box office

The film exceeded expectations by opening with an $68,033,544 in its first weekend. This was the second biggest opening for a non-summer, non-holiday release, after the $83,848,082 of the The Passion of the Christ. But the record for highest grossing weekend for March only lasted a year, due to the $70,885,301 weekend of 300. The film grossed a total of $195,330,621 at United States and Canadian box offices, making it the first film in 2006 to pass the $100 million mark. On August 3, 2009, the film surpassed Finding Nemo and became the highest-grossing animated feature in foreign revenue with $457 million, before it was replaced by the sequel, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs with more than $680 million. The film has grossed $655,388,158 worldwide and it is the 51st highest grossing film of all time. Ice Age: The Meltdown was the highest grossing animated film worldwide of 2006, but lost to Cars for being the highest grossing animated film in the U.S.

Soundtrack

The score is by John Powell; the soundtrack also features the song "Food Glorious Food" from the musical and film Oliver!. He composes brand new music for the film that replaced the theme songs from the previous film. Aram Khachaturyan's Adagio from Spartacus is featured during Scrat's Heavenly vision.

Ice Age: The Meltdown
Film score by John Powell
Released	March 28, 2006 (2006-03-28)
Genre	Score
Label	Varèse Sarabande

Ice Age: The Meltdown was composed by John Powell and was released on March 28, 2006 by Varèse Sarabande Records.

No.	Title	Length
1.	"The Waterpark"
2.	"The Vulture of Doom"
3.	"Migration"
4.	"Call of the Mammoth"
5.	"Sad Manny and the Possums"
6.	"Manny and Ellie Meet"
7.	"Traveling with the Possums"
8.	"12 Ton Mammoth & a 10 Ton Possum"
9.	"Attack from Below the Ice"
10.	"Extreme Possum"
11.	"Who Will Join Me on the Dung Heap?"
12.	"Log Moving"
13.	"Ellie Remembers"
14.	"Foggy Balance"
15.	"Goodnight Sweet Possums"
17.	"Sid's Sing-A-Long"
18.	"Food Glorious Food"
19.	"The Boat and the Geysers"
20.	"The Dam Breaks"
21.	"Ellie Gets Trapped"
22.	"Manny to the Rescue"
23.	"Rescues All Around"
24.	"Scrat to the Rescue"
25.	"The Water Recedes"
26.	"Mammoths"
27.	"With the Herd"
28.	"Into the Sunset"
29.	"The Pearly Gates"
30.	"CPR"
31.	"Mini-Sloths Sing-A-Long"
32.	"The Meltdown"

Sequel

Main article: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

The third film in the Ice Age series, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was released on July 1, 2009. It was again directed by Carlos Saldanha, and it tells a story of Sid being taken by a female Tyrannosaurus rex after stealing her eggs, leading the rest of the protagonists to rescue him in a tropical world inhabited by dinosaurs.

Video game

A 2006 video and computer game based on the film was developed and published by Vivendi Games, and the Wii version was released shortly after the launch of the system.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
North American Wii cover art
Developer(s)	Vivendi Games, Eurocom, Amaze Entertainment
Publisher(s)	Vivendi Games, Sierra Entertainment
Platform(s)	Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Windows, Xbox, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, Wii
Release date(s)	NA March 14, 2006 (2006-03-14) Wii NA December 6, 2006 EU December 8, 2006 AUS February 15, 2007
Genre(s)	Adventure Game
Mode(s)	Single-player
Rating(s)	BBFC: U ESRB: E10+ OFLC: G PEGI: 3+
System requirements Windows 2000 or better, Intel Pentium 4 1.4 GHz equivalent or higher, 256 MB RAM, 64Mb DirectX 9-compatible video card, DirectX 9-compatible sound card, 1.4 GB uncompressed hard drive space, 4x CD-ROM drive

Game plot

In this game, Scrat is caught up in the events of the film, Ice Age: The Meltdown and is trying to pursue acorns while interacting with some characters, some of whom help him in his quest. The game starts off by showing the icy areas where it began in the film and moving on to the woods, as well as exploring regions in the games such as the bowels of the sea reptile, Maelstrom, and swampy lands. In the game, Scrat occasionally allies himself with some of the main characters, and the player sometimes can play as either Sid or Diego, though not Manny. Characters which were shown as bit parts in the film are shown usually as adversaries or (in the case of one, a songbird) a guide to the next nut, though a select number of foes were not shown in the film at all.

Reception

The game received mixed to positive reviews.

See also

• List of animated feature-length films
• List of characters in the Ice Age films
• List of computer-animated films

External links

• Official website
• Ice Age: The Meltdown at the Internet Movie Database
• Ice Age: The Meltdown at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Ice Age: The Meltdown at AllRovi
• Ice Age: The Meltdown at Rotten Tomatoes
• Ice Age: The Meltdown at Metacritic
• Ice Age: The Meltdown at Box Office Mojo

Video game

• Official website
• Ice Age 2: The Meltdown at MobyGames
• Ice Age 2: The Meltdown at Eurocom