Ice Age: The Meltdown

Carlos Saldanha co-directed the first film with Chris Wedge; here he was on his own, and the work was finished in roughly eight months. The crew grew to compensate, with sixty animators against thirty five on the original. The bet paid off commercially: 68 million dollars in the North American opening weekend and 667 million worldwide. The money is visible in two places. Fur moved off the card-based method of the first film onto a volumetric hair system, and Scrat alone carries some two million hairs, two thousand of them wired to a control layer that lets them lag in wind and motion. Water was harder: the dam collapse was run through a fluid package, while splashes were corrected by hand in the older drawn tradition. The storytelling is far simpler. This is a countdown plus a road trip, with episodes loosely linked. The emotional centre is Manny’s fear of being the last mammoth alive, and Ellie’s belief that she is a possum turns that fear into comedy. Scrat’s thread runs apart and can be followed on its own. For a viewer who accepts 91 minutes of episodic escape comedy and wants the first film’s voices back. Not for one looking for real menace as the water rises, since every threat is balanced by a joke in the same scene.