The original Ice Age was a very pleasant surprise, a computer animated film which gave the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks a run for their money – so a sequel was pretty much inevitable. As with the original, the animation here is superb, with director Carlos Saldanha wasting no opportunity to fill the screen with cute creatures, broad landscapes and some stunning underwater shots.
This time around, however, it’s all is let down by a badly patched-together plot – our central trio simply catapult from one perilous situation to another, resulting in a string of hit and miss set-pieces rather than a cohesive story.
It's charming enough, though, and there's plenty of laughs, mainly thanks to the reappearance of hapless, bulge-eyed squirrel-rat-thing Scrat, whose ongoing quest for acorns is this time stretched across the entire film with increasingly hilarious results.