Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)

...Upon the release of a cartoon movie, the only theatre in Los Alamos is transformed into a mini circus. Start movie, the large screens are intensely monitored by a gamut of little creatures, ranging in size from the tiny ones whose fingers have not yet grown out of their purple palms to the ones that have learnt to use their saber swords and secretly worship Jedi knights. And then there are the girls who use "like" and "Oh! My God!" more frequently than the spaces in their sentences. Add their parents, who let their kids settle scores with fist-fights, while managing to conserve their equanimity with admirable ease, the whole mess becomes a remarkable and delightful pot-pourri. And that is why I love watching cartoons in Los Alamos. Today, my seat was next to a little girl with a peace loving cup of coke resting between us. Everytime I laughed, she would look at me and laugh. I had the best seat in the theatre!

The movie? Yes, the graphics in deux were much improved over part-un -- creatures with hairs were abundant (Technical tidbit: Hairs constitute one of the most difficult simulation challenges in cartoon movies because of their movement and properties of light reflection), the sceneries were more detailed, and appeared to carry more depth.

Like any modern cartoon movie, this one had its share of funny moments, friendly carnivores, budding love between hairy mammoths, a pair of pesky possums that bicker with the saber-toothed tiger, a scapegoat sloth, etc.. Ultimately, if you are content with a standard cartoon, this one is a fail safe. But if you are looking for creativity or unusual scenarios, the screen may not have much. But you could always observe the theatre:

The father with a little girl that has barely learnt to crawl, sits in the front row. During one of the more romantic scenes, when the big mammoth talks about making babies with his girlfriend, our dude gets up and begins a frantic search for his baby! In his movie watching ardency, he let his kid crawl on the floor and she crawled away into darkness. Reuniting after a brief search, they satisfactorily shared the handfull of popcorns she had found from the floor; Soon after, a little boy gets up from the back rows and warns the mammoths: "This is going to be a failure" and the theatre is in splits; another much smaller kid (who had a vocabulary of a half a dozen words until yesterday) screams "dish... funnnny" and laughs, while his mother lets happy tears trickle down her face. Between the movie, the hyper-active audience and S, who was content with his dark-chocolate, the experience seemed pretty complete except for the...

...rather blatant adult dialogues that took some charm away, the double edged statements that were standard stuff and the spoofs on "sound of silence", "madagascar" etc. that were cliched . But the cliches were well executed, the soundtrack was quite decent and some of the jokes were pretty sharp. When placed in the balance, amongst the cartoon movies thus far, this would make it within the top 15.

Final verdict: Good but not brilliant. Must see, nevertheless. 7/10.