Ice Age: The Meltdown is the best kind of children's movie: It's funny and it's short. If you've got a kid younger than 10, prepare to see it multiple times, either at the theater or on DVD.
For fans of animation, Ice Age: The Meltdown is not good enough to join Toy Story, Shrek or Finding Nemo on the classics list, but it beats most of the cinematic dreck that pretends to entertain children these days.
At just over 80 minutes, Ice Age: The Meltdown is a lovable romp that mixes life lessons about friendship and loyalty with laughs. And not just mild giggles but actual belly busters, prompted mostly by Scrat, the hyperactive squirrel who won't give up his single-minded chase for an out-of-place acorn.
The TV trailers don't do this film justice.
The sequel to the 2002 original is smarter edged thanks to screenwriter John Vitti, a veteran writer from The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. Oh, there's still plenty of sweetness to woo the wee ones, but it never hurts to toss in a few gentle double-entendres to keep the folks interested. Chris Wedge turns over the directing reins to Carlos Saldanha, but stays to voice the squeaks of Scrat.
Ice Age: The Meltdown reunites Manny the woolly mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary). This time, it's not a human baby they are trying to protect, but themselves. Prehistoric global warming is turning their frozen wonderland into a mess of puddles and pools. And swimming is not everyone's strong suit.
Their only hope of survival is to trudge to higher ground. Don't think about timing too much or you'll wonder how the disparate group survived the thousands of years from the beginning of the Ice Age to the end. Sit back and enjoy the thaw.
A few subplots keep the trio, and story, moving forward. It appears Manny is the last of his species until Ellie (Queen Latifah) comes along with her opossum "brothers" Crash (Seann William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck). Ellie is blissfully unaware that she is different in every way from her much smaller siblings and has to be convinced by Manny that it's not just her footprints that make her a woolly girl.
(If you've got fans of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh, make sure they know beforehand that Josh Peck is the voice of Eddie. It's not often a kid actor voices characters in animated movies, and they'll like knowing.)
As the waters rise, tough Diego is forced to face his fear of water, and everyone is trying to avoid lurking underwater threats and a menacing band of vultures. Menacing that is, until the ugly birds break into a lively musical dance number worthy of the June Taylor dancers.
Oddly enough, there is chemistry between Manny and Ellie. You know a movie has suckered you in when you are rooting for two woolly mammoths to fall in love. Romano's laid-back delivery plays off Queen Latifah's upbeat confidence, and we just know things will work out for the two of them.
How ridiculous is that? But that's the beauty of Ice Age: The Meltdown -- it'll melt your heart.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
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Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
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