This film was originally rated G by the MPAA, but was re-rated PG by the MPAA for some mild language and innuendo. The working title was Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, but for the movie's final release, the creators decided to remove the number 2, calling it Ice Age: The Meltdown, as the movie follows the same characters as the first one, starting where the first ended. However, in the UK, Ireland, Mexico, and Australia, its title is promoted as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. Also, most of the sponsors of the movie had the 2 in their packaging after the name change (they however did edit the 2 out of their TV ads).
In the opening scene, Scrat, the prehistoric fictional saber-toothed squirrel (that has a rat's long snout) who is desperate for his acorn, climbs up a glacier side, hoping to take back his acorn. He pulls it out with significant force, but unknowingly also opens a hole in the glacier, which water soon leaks out of. Scrat tries to plug up the hole, but it cracks more open, so he tries drinking the water but lost his grip on the glacier, revealing that the ice which the animals live near is slowly melting away.
In the next shot, the Ice Age animals are having a ball in their new world full of water slides made of ice, naturally caused whirlpools and hot springs. Sid opens a camp called "Campo del Sid". He thinks the kids look up to him, but they actually torture him in many ways, such as using him as a pinata, and burying him. However, soon Manny the mammoth, Sid the ground sloth, and Diego the saber-toothed cat enjoy themselves as well, all but Sid, who wishes for more respect among his fellow animals.Manny tells a story about a burrow, which a little elk calls the burrow a wild ass. Soon, the trio discover, by Fast Tony and Stu, a pair of local con artists trying to sell off products for surviving underwater, that the global warming had caused a flood and caused the ice of the valley to melt (as demonstrated by Scrat in the beginning of the film, when trying to recover his acorn), and it is kept from destroying the valley only by the glaciers, which have formed a dam. Time is running out, and as soon as a vulture known as the Lone Gunslinger tells the animals that a boat (which is actually a giant piece of a fallen tree) can lead them to safety, they set off in a rush to find it.
As this happens, the trio accidentally breaks off a piece of the glacier, which contains Cretaceous and Maelstrom, two sea reptiles from the Mesozoic, that had been frozen in the now melting glacier, while Manny appears to be the only one who sees something wrong with the chunk of ice, while not knowing exactly what it is. Stu the glyptodont is an example of these reptiles as he is soon eaten, leaving behind his shell alone.
In the next shot, Scrat is shown pining for his acorn, which has landed from his fall under a sheet of ice; Scrat tries to break through the ice, but gets trapped under a sheet of ice. He uses his teeth to cut out a ring, but the ring is stuck around his head and he rolls around. Eventually, by his rolling he pushes the acorn onto a beam, and soon afterwards falls on the opposite side and catapults the acorn onto a high ledge by mistake.
Along the way, Manny becomes depressed when other animals (especially Sid) tease him about being the last mammoth alive. After following a trumpeting sound not unlike a mammoth's call, Manny, Sid, and Diego encounter Cholly, who produced loud flatulence which sounded like the call. Manny wishes to be alone, leaving Diego and Sid alone, unknowingly to be heckled by two opossums, Crash and Eddie. The oppossums proceed to torture Sid and Diego with peashooters made from reeds, and by ducking in and out of sight in a manner not unlike Whack-A-Mole and Twister (game), their nimble attacks were enough to leave Sid and Diego in a pile. Meanwhile, Manny comes across the opossums' “sister”, a female mammoth named Ellie who believes she is an opossum. Manny has a hard time convincing her she is a mammoth, a task he must perform if they are to save the species from extinction. Sid invites her to tag along with the group to escape the flood, and she brings her brothers, who aren't exactly on good terms with Sid and Diego.
Scrat tries to catch his acorn by sliding off an icy slide, and falls into the water with his acorn. He is then confronted by piranhas, which he does battle with using kung-fu and knocks the piranhas senseless, not knowing that a condor would come along and take his acorn. In the night, Scrat makes his way into the condor's nest, and fights a baby condor over his acorn, which he soon loses when he was booted out of the nest by the mother, which soon came back, none too happy at the intruder of her nest.
After a perilous ordeal with the sea reptiles, Sid finds out that Diego is afraid of water. Later Crash asks Manny to catapult him out of a tree into a pond but instead made a painfull collision with a tree and to Eddie's delight miraculuosly survives unharmed. Ellie is playing with her brothers and gets stuck under a log. Manny 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 when she was all alone and isolated from her herd. She finally realises she is a mammoth and starts getting along with Manny but soon grows apart from him when he suggests "saving their species". In time, when the situation calls for it, to save them all from falling into a gorge of pointed rocks, they make up. During the night, while all are asleep, Sid is kidnapped by a tribe of mini-sloths (they are likely modern-day three-toed sloths, though they also share traits with ground sloths) who call him the Fire King (a reference to the first Ice Age, when Sid lights a fire during the journey and proclaims himself to be "Lord of the Flames") and attempt to sacrifice him to a volcano to save themselves from the meltdown. As luck would have it, Sid shot out of the volcano's vent unintentionally by means of the vines which bound his feet acting like bungee cords.
The next morning, the group of animals regroups with Sid, who claims himself to be taken by "a tribe of mini-sloths", but is stopped when the group finds out that they had overslept and that the ice was melting. They therefore rush off to try and reach the boat, and are waylaid by some hot geysers, which separate Manny, Sid, and Diego from Ellie and her brothers.
While this happens, the dam cracks, and lets loose water which floods the land completely, taking Scrat along in the condor's nest, which the baby condor and the mother condor had abandoned so as to escape the flood. Scrat is swept off in the nest, and soon makes it back to the glacier, trying to escape the flood with his acorn as a pickaxe to climb the glacier.
In time, Manny saves Ellie from drowning when she was trapped 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 attempting to eat the animals, but, due to Manny's quick thinking, are finished off by a rock which falls on them. While all this happens, the other animals are taken on a death ride on the "boat" as it floats about, and are off at the mercy of the water currents.
Scrat reaches the top of the dam, but as seen in the first movie, causes a crack which travels through the weakened parts of the dam he made with his acorn, eventually causing a huge fissure in the dam. Scrat tries to take his acorn but it falls down as he tries to catch it while holding on to the glaciers for dear life and finally almost kills himself when he gets sucked in with the water, accidentally diverting the meltdown and unwittingly saving the valley in the process.
In the final scene, a herd of mammoths shows up, removing the need for Manny 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.
The epilogue shows Scrat having a near death experience after falling into the fissure he accidentally opened whcih diverted the flood and saved the animals. 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. 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.
Spoilers end here.
Goofs
Sid gave the name of his camp Campo del Sid, which supposedly is translated as Camp of Sid, however it would actually be "Field of Sid". The correct Spanish for Camp of Sid is "Campamento de Sid".
The piranha that bites the acorn (and Scrat's arm) is flung to the right by Scrat when he gets angry, and is lying almost off-screen, although, when he finishes beating up the rest of the pirahnas, the acorn is in another piranha, closer to him. The acorn could not move from one piranha to another.
On the "Ice Age 2 Factoid Meltdown" quiz feature on the DVD game, one question is "How many possums are seen in the movie?" and on the quiz "2" is the answer. But actually, that is untrue, as you also see Crash and Eddie's mother in Ellie's flashback, making the answer actually "3".
In the first Ice Age movie it was made out that ice age was beginning, but in this movie it is ending. This is attributed to the fact that throughout ancient history there was more than one ice age.
Also in the first Ice Age movie, Scrat was shown to have been frozen in a block of ice and have washed up to a tropical beach, unfreezing 20,000 years later. However, he reappears in this movie. It would be thought that he freezes after this movie, but Scrat is shown to have frozen in the cave chase in the first movie.
References to other films and culture
In the beginning of the movie, Scrat is seen climbing a glacier. This is a reference to Mission Impossible 2, when Tom Cruise is climbing a mountain in a similar fashion.
The movie contains biblical references, such as the animals going onto the "boat" to escape the flood, which is likely a reference to Noah's Ark. Scrat dying to save the valley and "coming back" to life again may be a reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Scrat's act of parting the glaciers, that saves the other animals, may be a reference to Mosesparting the Red Sea.
Many people found the film's plot about a flood coming, and walls of glaciers breaking inappropriate, since the movie was released seven months after Hurricane Katrina, which broke levees in New Orleans in a similar fashion. Many people at Blue Sky after Katrina's landfall wanted to delay the movie's release from March 2006 to November 2006, but could not. [1][2].
The vultures originally had a role in the previous Ice Age, but their roles were scrapped. Their original designs can be seen in the special features on the DVD.
The movie contains a spoof of Saving Private Ryan, when Manny is hit by a geyser and temporarily loses his hearing. Incidentally, the German voice for Manny, Arne Elsholtz, also synchronizes Tom Hanks, who also stars in that movie, which creates an insider joke by happenstance in the German version.
The sequences in which Scrat battles a group of pirahnas and fighting a baby condor for the acorn were originally considered for the opening of the movie and teaser trailer.[3]
The reason why Roshan, the baby from the first movie and other humans are not featured in this movie is because the makers felt the idea was too predictable, considering the many story pitches from other screenwriters the filmmakers recieved, all including Roshan.[4]
Manny mockingly refers to Sid as a platypus. Syd the platypus was one of the three mascots chosen for the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Like in All Dogs go to Heaven Scrat coming back from heaven is just like when Charlie comes back but he did it on purpose.
When Ellie says that Manny was fat and Manny just says that his hair was poofy, it is very similar to Manny and Sid's talk in the first movie.
When Sid is making actions that the other sloths follow, they are also from Daddy Day Care.
Facts on the film
The breaking glacial dam is likely a reference to the Missoula Floods of the late Pleistocene.
The ultimate ending of Cretaceous and Malestrom, the two reptiles, remains dubious. The essential guide says that they were later eaten by mini-sloths, while the storybook maintains that they were picked off by vultures. The mini-sloths eating the bodies of these two creatures seems unlikely, as sloths of any species are traditionally vegetarian (though some species of ground sloths do sometimes eat meat) and the vultures picking the sea reptiles off seems more likely as the vultures were singing on how they'd wanted their meals.
The film has become the first Blu-ray disc released film to be pirated, meaning the copy protection has been cracked .The full uncompressed Blu-ray disk image was made available online in areas such as Bittorrent soon after the film Serenity, which was also the first film to be pirated in the competing high definition disc format.
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, and Robots (another Blue Sky Studios film).
On Family Guy's episode "Sibling Rivalry," Scrat is shown trying to take three nuts out of a 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 movie 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.
A teaser trailer for The Simpsons Movie was attached to every print of the movie, despite rumors that it was only on some prints.
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 movie), when suddenly an eagle comes over and swipes it from him.
Box Office
Ice Age: The Meltdown opened on March 31, 2006. Critical reviews were mainly mixed, Rotten Tomatoes giving the film a "Rotten" or "Cream of the Crop" rating, with only 56% of reviews positive. 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 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 movie in 2006 to pass the $100 million mark.
In the Netherlands, the film grossed €152,262 in its first week, not enough to enter the top 10. In its second week (March 30 - April 5), the film moved up to #1, grossing €1,350,375, kicking Inside Man from its #1 position there. The film has accomplished an amazing job by remaining in the top 3 for 9 weeks. In total, the film grossed € 6,108,685 in the Netherlands.
As of January 12, 2007, the film grossed a massive $647,260,749 worldwide according to Box Office Mojo, surpassing all expectations and netting the film a massive profit given the moderate budget of $75 million. At time of writing, it holds the 28th spot on the list of highest-grossing films.
Soundtrack
The score is by John Powell; the soundtrack also features the song "Food Glorious Food" from the musical Oliver!. He composes brand new music for the film that replaced the theme songs from the previous film.
Animals featured
Aardvark (the doubting aardvark father which maintains that mammoths have truly gone extinct and several others)
Baptornis (seen going down the waterslides in formation)*
Brontops (seen in waterpark questioning Manny's storytelling, referred to as "rhino" in script)*
Chalicotherium (Cholly, as well as several others seen on the "boat")*
Condor (young hatchling fights with Scrat over the acorn)
Dodo (seen being killed by the hot geysers, and then in the squirrel heaven)
Elk (seen in migration, one making way down waterslide and poking a Paleocastor in the rear with his horns, appropriately referred to as "elk" in script, the younger individuals acted like gazelles)
Triceratops (skeleton seen in the lava pit when Sid was falling)
Vulture (seen singing "Food, Glorious Food" from Oliver! when in pursuit of their prey)
Animals with an asterisk were extinct by the time the movie was set.
Inaccuracies
The opossums are referred to as "possum" throughout the film. Scientifically speaking, the term "possum" is usually reserved for a group of Australian squirrel-like tree dwelling marsupials. However, the name was derived from opossums of North America, which they resemble.
Sid claims tigers are the only animals that can not swim while they are infants. In fact, tigers are one of the few cats that take to water (but Sid was referring to Smilodon, whose appropriate name is "saber-toothed cat").
Both the Metriorhynchus and the Placodus in the film differ greatly from the true animals, in that neither is the appropriate size and both have superfluous fins.
Armadillos cannot retract into their "shell," they roll up instead.
Baptornis did not live at the time of the ice age. And those shown do not seem to have come from melted ice like Cretaceous and Maelstrom, though since many of the creatures in the film did not live during the same time period. This is a matter of artistic license.
Macrauchenia in the first film were comparatively taller than the mammoths, but have been shrunk down for their role in this film, in order to provide a measure of factual accuracy and to aid the story's continuity.
It's worth noting that neither Placodus or Metriorhynchus (Maelstrom and Cretaceous) would have survived in a glacier. During their time period, the world's temperature was still too high for ice to form anywhere, ergo they could not have survived through the millions of years of being frozen, because they would never have been frozen at all. They would have been extinct long before the world cooled down that much. Plus, since the water was icy, and they were both reptiles and therefor cold-blooded, they couldn't survive in such presumably cold temperatures.
The snow-covered trees in Ellie's flashback scene would probably not have survived to the point at which they were seen in the grove in which the flashback occurred.
Ice melts from the outside, not from the inside, but if the ice melted from the outside the animals might have had more time to escape.
Ironically, Manny's species is actually said to be the last of the valley's prehistoric species to become extinct, the rest (especially Sid's and Diego's species) are supposed to be extinct first.
Dung beetles do not have horns on their "faces".
Glyptodonts and armadillos don't have a shell on their stomachs.
No tree species can grow big enough to accommodate thousands of animals.
Crash and Eddie would probably have not survived to the point when Ellie reached adulthood.
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