ice age the meltdown Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Let's be perfectly fair here: I didn't hate Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. That isn't to say I loved it, either. More like I was just mostly indifferent to it, in much the way that I'm mostly indifferent to grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. Admittedly, the film got off to a bit of a rocky start with me, with its opening scene of a gang of thuggish Ice Age animal children picking on and beating up on Sid the sloth, their camp counselor. Note to people in Fox script department: parents really hate it when you encourage their tykes to truss up the nearest adult and play pinata with him with a wooden baseball bat. Even my kids were appalled by that bit; my six-year-old son, eyebrows knitted in his "worried" look, whispered, "Mommy, why are those kids being so mean to Sid? That's not really very nice, right, Mommy?"

As you can probably guess from the title, the sequel to the popular Ice Age is about the global warming that caused the end of the Ice Age. You could probably get all scientific and actually prove that because Ice Age 2 had a (insert extinct mammal of your choice here) in it, there's no way the end of the Ice Age was happening by Ice Age 2, because everyone knows that (extinct mammal) was extinct well before the end of the Ice Age. I don't care. Things are warming up, the ice is melting into natural waterslide parks, and the thick fur coats are starting to feel a little out of season. Nobody's too worried, though, until a traveling salesman comes by warning of a gargantuan flood that's going to engulf the cozy valley you call home. The only way out, he says, is through the end of the valley, where a giant boat is waiting. Um...a boat? A flood? Wait, did I walk into a Veggie Tales movie by mistake?

Dear James,

You asked whether having kids makes me view kid flicks differently, and whether having kids makes reviewing a family film easier. To answer the first part of your question - to be honest, I'd have to say that my perspective on movies in general is inexorably affected by being a parent, especially when a film concerns parent-child relationships in any way. I remember bawling my eyes out when I took my then 2 1/2-year-old daughter to see Tarzan while I was pregnant with my older son; the whole "You'll Be in My Heart" sequence just tore me up. It's interesting that you used your niece's reaction to Finding Nemo as an example, because the opening of that film was upsetting to me as well. It's kind of a Disney thing to do in the mother within the first minutes of the film, though; I suspect it must be in the Disney Bible somewhere that the change that kicks off the movie should involve the death of a parent. That's a much scarier to most kids than the mythical boogie-man.