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No lie, Ray Romano is doing excellent dramatic work as the voice of Manny the Woolly Mammoth in this second installment of what’ll probably become a franchise mega-computo-pixel-rrific funny-animal series. Manny is the morose de facto leader of a motley group of mostly headed-for-extinction animals, featuring the topnotch vocal dramaturgy of John Leguizamo (Sid the Giant Sloth), Denis Leary (Diego the Sabretooth Tiger), and Queen Latifah (Ellie the Woolly Mammoth—er, -ess?), running for their lives from the prehistoric round of global warming, while discovering all kinds of heartwarming crap about identity, courage, and family, in a story that moves along nicely while masterfully ignoring the fact that they are all ultimately Doomed. This is a kids’ picture, after all, they’ll get enough Death outside the movie theater, right? Also featuring the compelling Looney Tunes/Chuck Jones/Tex Avery-inspired antics of Scrat (Chris Wedge), a crazed prehistoric squirrel just tryin’ to get a nut.

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