Awesome Music: "Mammoths", which unsurprisingly plays when an enormous herd of mammoths appears at the very end of the movie. Even critics and audience members who otherwise didn't like the movie agree that the song and its scene are magnificent, especially considering it was composed by John Powell, who would go on to create the universally acclaimed soundtrack for How to Train Your Dragon.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The vultures' "Food Glorious Food", though Sid sings it briefly right after, but is never mentioned again after that.
Common Knowledge: Oppositors of later movies tend to argue that this movie involves the melting of the glaciers and therefore the end of the Ice Age, which is used as a justification for this installment being considered the Grand Finale of the series. That's not what happens, the movie focused on the valley where the protagonists are living in, being about to flood because of an ice wall barely holding a massive body of water, there's no sign in the movie that this is an issue for anyone else besides the valley where the Herd were living at the time, so is quite a stretch to argue this will be the end of the Ice Age at a global scale.
Contested Sequel: A lot of fans see it as a great follow up on the first movie that perfectly expands on the characters and story of the original movie and complements and concludes Manny's arc from the first movie nicely. Other fans see it as a bland movie with a boring and predictable story that wastes Sid and Diego and is a huge Franchise Original Sin for the following sequels. How it compares with the rest of the franchise is also a point of contention, some fans see it as a Even Better Sequel, others think is good but not as good as the first one and other fans think is the worst of the trilogy by far.
Critic-Proof: The film received mixed reviews from critics, scoring a 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, but went on to become a box office success, grossing $660 million on its $80 million budget.
Even Better Sequel: At least by a portion of critics and fans. Even that who don't think it falls into that trope consider it a pretty good follow-up.
Scrat falling off and "dying" after saving everyone.
First Installment Wins: More like first sequel in this case. The Meltdown is the best-reviewed Ice Age sequel among critics and audiences, receiving praise for being a natural continuation of the first movie's story and having mostly good additions to the cast as well as some positive critics and fans arguing that this film is just as good as, or an Even Better Sequel to the original movie.
Among other things, later sequels got heavily criticized for constantly adding brand new characters to the herd to the point that they either failed to get utilized to their full potential or forced other characters who'd been around longer and were already more widely beloved off to the wayside of the plot. However, as Animatpoints out, these trends technically have their roots in this film with the introduction of Ellie, whose romance with Manny takes up so much of the plot that, between said romance and the threat of the flood, Diego's arc of overcoming his fear of water only gets a comparative handful of scenes devoted to it and Sid's Dude, Where's My Respect? arc feels almost like an afterthought. However, viewers were willing to accept, or at least overlook, these matters since Ellie's presence made perfect sense from a narrative perspective due to her romance with Manny serving as both a natural continuation of Manny's storyline from the original movie involving his lost previous family as well as a happy resolution to his Last of His Kind fears he undergoes earlier in the film. And of course, the amount of time devoted to her and Manny in the story allowed for her to be well written and fleshed out enough to be able to stand on her own merits as a character in the story without coming across as a Satellite Love Interest. As far as Diego and Sid's comparative downplaying in the plot was concerned, Diego was still the character amongst the original trio that managed to get the 2nd highest amount of screen time devoted to his arc after Manny, while Sid made up for his own arc's comparatively getting underserved by playing a crucial role in helping Diego overcome his fear of water. Later sequels, however, would keep adding even more characters to the herd's roster while not allowing them to have anywhere near enough time to be properly fleshed out and integrated with the rest beyond the most barebones personalities or story roles while also at times completely upstaging more widely beloved older characters, with Diego perhaps being the worst hit in regards to this. This gives viewers much less reason to like them in comparison to how much effort and care had been put into Ellie's integration into the plot.
Later installments got criticized for turning the franchise from a semi-accurate portrayal of animals surving the Ice Age into a Fantasy Kitchen Sink with dinosaurs and fantasy elements. However, it can be argued that the trend started with Cretaceous and Maelstrom, who are reptiles from the Mesozoic era that were long extinct by the time the Ice Age started. The main difference is that , first of all, they do have a semi-realistic justification in the plot, by being sealed in the ice and then realesed with the titular meltdown, meaning that the creators were lampshading the fact they wouldn't be alive during the Ice Age with these two being a notable exception. And most importantly, they don't drive attention away from ice age-related natural disasters like the main flood, which is still the focus of the plot. In the latter movies, the more historically inaccurate and fantastical elements took center stage in the plot, leading the Ice Age-elements to become irrelevant, and they never bothered to give them any sort of handwave to the more jarring elements.
Informed Wrongness: How Manny and Ellie's first argument ultimately works out. She's furious when he says it's their responsibility to breed, but in the end, apologizes for "overreacting." Manny lamely apologizes for making her overreact and even that has to be dragged from him.
Padding: Sid is kidnapped by a tribe of mini-sloths who make him their "Fire-King" and then attempt to sacrifice him in order to stop the flooding. He escapes and returns to the group the next morning, though they don't believe his story. While the mini-sloths return in the ending, this minor subplot has very little relation to the rest of the film.
So Okay, It's Average: The film is held in this regard to some, not reaching the level of quality of the first movie but usually considered better than the latter sequels.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: That herd of mammoths that appear at the end of the movie? Never followed up on in any of the subsequent sequels, though other mammoths eventually appear in the sequels who may or may not have been among them.
Viewer Species Confusion: Cretaceous and Maelstrom are commonly identified by fans as a Metriorhynchus and a Globidens, respectively. According to most official sources, they're actually an ichthyosaur and a pliosaur of ambiguous species (not that they look much like it).
Although the online game Ice Age Village and official magazine Ice Age: Animal Collection indeed identifies Cretaceous as a Metriorhynchus.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The animation and lighting is a great improvement over that of the first film and, among the nearly-dozens of computer-animated films released in theaters in 2006, its visuals hold up by far the best. The climax of the movie in particular makes great use of its water effects for 2006.
What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The film was released around the time the world began to grow more aware of climate change, which remains a politically divisive topic to this day. Naturally, quite a few critics and pundits discussed the film in relation to the crisis.
Death by drowning is unnervingly dark and graphic considering this game's target audience and the rest of the game having more slapstick-y failure scenes. If Scrat's Oxygen Meter runs out underwater, his life rapidly decreases as he makes pained gurgling and choking noises. If that hits zero as well, the squirrel's eyes roll into the back of his head as he visibly inhales a lungful of water and goes limp.
At one point in bog level you have to fight with GIANT spider, that has red eyes and makes robot-like sounds. The fact that Scrat is smaller than spider, makes it more unnerving.
No Problem with Licensed Games: An overall enjoyable game with nice looking graphics, good gameplay with a deceptive amount of exploration and puzzle-solving, and solid minigames.
, which unsurprisingly plays when an enormous herd of mammoths appears at the very end of the movie. Even critics and audience members who otherwise didn't like the movie agree that the song and its scene are magnificent, especially considering it was composed by John Powell, who would go on to create the universally acclaimed soundtrack for How to Train Your Dragon.