Monday, May 19, 2008

Ice Age: The Meltdown


In the opening scene, Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel climbs up a glacier side, hoping to take back his acorn. He pulls it out, unknowingly opening a hole in the glacier, which water soon jets out of. With that, Scat is shot down with the stream. The world of ice is slowly melting.

In the next shot, 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: Manfred, Sid, and Diego. Sid opens a day camp, where none of the younger creatures take him seriously, nor do Manfred and Diego, which leaves Sid seeking a daring deed for more respect. Soon, the trio discover Fast Tony and Stu, a pair of local con artists claiming that the earth will flood and that the bark and reeds which they sell are needed to snorkel and stay aloft. Manfred dismisses the idea, but is distracted when he sees that Sid will try to high dife from a giant waterfall; as Manfred goes with Diego to the top of the waterfall to save Sid from his act of daredevilryness, they see that the pleasant weather caused the ice of the valley to melt, and it is kept from destroying the valley only by the glaciers, which have formed a dam. It is then that a turkey vulture known as the Lone Ranger tells the animals that a giant piece of a fallen tree can act as a boat and save them from the floods; all soon set out to find it.

During the time that the masses of animals escape, a glacier which contains two sea reptiles from the Mesozoic era, (Cretaceous and Maelstrom), breaks off. The con-man Stu is an example of these reptiles' hunger as he is soon devoured, leaving behind his shell alone.

Along the way, Manfred grows unhappy when other animals tease him about being the last mammoth alive. Manfred takes his leave for a moment leaving Diego and Sid alone unknowingly to be heckled by two opossums named Crash and Eddie. The opossums proceed to torture Sid and Diego, shooting pebbles at them and baiting them to fight in the manner of Whac-A-Mole. Meanwhile, Manfred meets Ellie, a female mammoth who believes she is an opossum and the sister of Crash and Eddie which makes no sense. Sid invites her to tag along with the group to escape the flood, and she brings her brothers, who spare no chance at their pranks.

After a perilous ordeal with Cretaceous and Maelstrom, Sid finds out that Diego is afraid of water. As they walk Ellie plays with her brothers and gets stuck under a log. Manfred lifts it off her and it opens up an area which Ellie recalls from her childhood as the place where she was adopted by her brothers' mother. She finally realises she is a mammoth and starts getting along with Manfred but grows apart from him when he suggests "saving thier species". In time, when the situation calls for it, to save them all from falling into a gorge of pointed rocks, they make up. huh. During the night, while all are asleep, Sid is kidnapped by a tribe of mini-sloths (small sloths) who believe Sid to be a god. Sid lights a fire for them, and believes that he has found respect as their deity, but they plan instead to sacrifice him to a volcano. Sid escapes this fate and returns with his herd.

The next morning Manfred and the others regroup with Sid who regales them with his experience with none convinced and they all find out that they had overslept. As they all rush to reach salvation, they find a field of hot geysers, which separate Manfred, Sid, and Diego from Ellie and her brothers. Each group believes in escaping the geysers differently(Namely Manny and Ellie).

When the flood comes, Manfred saves Ellie from drowning as she is caught in a grotto of rocks, while Diego overcomes his fear of water to save Sid. All is about to be ruined when Cretaceous and Maelstrom come about, but due to Manfred's quick thinking, they are finished off by a rock which falls on them, killing them both. While all this happens, the other animals are taken on a death ride on the boat as it floats about, and are all off at the mercy of the water currents like.

Meanwhile Scratch 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. Scratch is then washed away in the raging water.

In the final scene, a herd of mammoths shows up, removing the need for Manfred and Ellie to mate and proving to other animals that mammoths are not extinct; however, love triumphs and they decide to remain together anyway, taking Sid, Diego, and the opossum brothers along. Now they are one big happy family: a sloth, a sabre toothed cat, two opossums and two mammoths.

The epilogue shows Scrab having a near death experience after falling into the fissure he mistakenly opened. He enters a heaven full of acorns, amazed completely. He sees a gigantic acorn, reaches for it and nearly grabs it. Suddenly, he finds himself torn away from heaven (The music stopping abruptly). He wakes up in the arms of Sid the sloth, who had resuscitated him. Taken from his heavenly, giant acorn, Scrat is enraged and proceeds to attack his savior.

Characters

Just as in the original, prehistoric animals are the focus of the story.

The protagonists are:

Joining them are:

Among the characters they meet are:

And attempting to stop them are:

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