It’s ironic - don’t you think? - that the art of digitally rendering breathtaking vistas of snow and ice, swept by winds that whip up little flurries of frozen particles whose every vortex is lovingly plotted by a vast bank of dedicated supercomputers (actually a rackful of “commodity” PCs running Linux, but don’t tell Ballmer), should have reached such a peak of perfection as is evident in the Ice Age movies at the very historical moment when the polar ice caps are in the process of vanishing from the face of the earth.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown features quite a number of now-extinct species, as well as a pair of atavistic dino-croc predators which emerge from frozen hibernation to harry the protagonists with implacable many-fanged malice. This puts the characters’ struggle for survival soberingly into perspective: they live in a world in which not only individual death but also species-level extinction is an acknowledged fact of existence. It is something like the world imagined by Tennyson’s In Memoriam, perhaps the first major English poem to register the shock of what the geologists of the period were beginning to learn from the fossil record. It is a world in which time, “a maniac scattering dust” in Tennyson’s words, is experienced as both the biological time of individual life-spans and the geological time in which ice ages come and go: as a time in which the “argument of the fossil” forces its way into the language of everyday reportage.

Although the film is visually lively, full of ingeniously storyboarded episodes of tension and excitement, the overall narrative pace is set by the lumbering progress of Manfred the mammoth and his ad hoc, inter-species “herd” of companions. The ground beneath their feet is melting away, revealing both hidden ancestral terrors and the blank, uncompromising face of a newly hostile environment. This situation is not milked for “relevance” - in particular, there is no impotent demand for renewed environmental consciousness and commitment to ecological values. Their main virtue in this disappearing world is to take care of one another and carry on.

Given what I’ve said about the dual temporal frame of Ice Age 2, it’s unsurprising that it bears an ambiguous relationship to reproductive futurism: since the boy-girl axis of the story concerns a pair of woolly mammoths, we already know that there is no eternity for their offspring to inherit, that the time of their species is running out. When Manfred broaches the subject of the propagation of their kind with Ellie (who for much of the story in any case believes herself to be a possum), she immediately and contemptuously rejects the suggestion that she should feel obliged to mate with him purely for the sake of producing a new generation of mammoths. His being, apparently, the last male mammoth on earth carries no weight in the matter. Even though the “romantic” dimension of the story resolves with Ellie deciding to remain with Manfred (a decision that is explicitly separated from reproductive compulsion by the arrival on the scene of a large herd of other mammoths), the “herd” that lumbers off into the sunset at the end of the film is not simply a surrogate family unit, and its members do not assume or require familial roles within it.

Scrat the “proto-squirrel” and his acorn provide both comic diversion and an object-lesson in the vicissitudes of desire throughout both of the Ice Age films; the intention seems to have been to revive the tormented ghost of Wile E. Coyote, and the highest praise I can give to his makers is to aver that they have succeeded. The sheer, sustained sisyphean futility of Scrat’s endeavours is the ideal counterpoint to the films’ otherwise humane and kindly outlook, both validating it and showing the precipice on which it is perched. Sartre would have sympathised with Scrat.