More straightforwardly, Ice Age: The Sequel. Our three inseparable prehistoric mammals -- woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger -- face global warming (as they are already calling it) and the impending inundation of their frozen valley. Even if they can escape the flood, outrun the rapacious sea beasts, and catch the prototype of Noah's Ark, the end is still near. And at the end of a sequel, even with a final retreat into Major Denial, the end can only be nearer. The consciousness of imminent doomsday is compounded -- is complemented -- by the personal identity crisis, the extinction anxiety, of the sore-thumb mammoth: "What if I am the last mammoth?" On the trek, he will get an answer to his question when he runs into an opposite-sex mammoth who, raised among possums, acts and thinks like a possum herself, another sort of identity crisis. All this existential angst gives the film more resonance than some other computer cartoons, an ominous low hum drowned out nonetheless by the au courant smart-ass brassiness. The nonverbal squirrel, wrestling with his own existential angst, chasing the unattainable acorn, continues to put in intermittent appearances but ceases to steal the show. With the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, and Queen Latifah; directed by Carlos Saldanha. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd