YMMV / Ice Age: Continental Drift

• Adorkable: Louis. He's soft-spoken, shy, polite, has a huge crush on Peaches, tries to avoid danger, and likes digging.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Giant Enemy Crab is quickly dispatched by a tornado before it can really start fighting the gang.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Chasing the Sun" by The Wanted.
  • Captain Gutt's sea-shanty has a nice tune and is delightfully shameless in its bragginess.
  • The song "We Are Family" sung by the entire cast over the end credits.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • While popular with shippers, Shira is far less popular with fans who cite her lack of development outside of being Diego’s Love Interest and their romance in general, especially when compared to Ellie and her relationship with Manny, as well as her rushed and half-baked Heel–Face Turn.
  • While Louis has his fans thanks to his Adorkable Nice Guy nature and friendship with Peaches, others don’t care much for him and just see him as one more cliché teen sitcom character whose presence takes even more time away from the main plot. Furthermore, some find his crush on Peaches to be either cute or cringeworthy.
• Broken Base: Scrat causing the Continental Drift. Some dislike it for how wacky and over the top it is, specially given unlike other less realistic things in Scrat's segments this one actually affects the plot. Others don't see it as that big of a deal or agree is wacky but find it to be one of the best scenes in the movie so it gets a pass.
• Catharsis Factor: Considering how Gutt attempted to outright murder Manny's family for the sake of vengeance, it's hard to have any sympathy for him when he ultimately ends up eaten alive by Siren(s)^note While a single Siren yanked Gutt into its clam, one or two back-fins belonging to other Sirens can be seen swimming near the clam, suggesting they intend to join their kin in feasting on their latest victim after being defeated in the climax.
• Contested Sequel: Fans are split if this a good sequel or is it a sequel that shouldn't even exist. A lot of the split is dependent on how tolerant one is of the newer characters.
• Critic-Proof: Despite receiving mixed reviews, the film was a huge box office success, grossing $161 million in the domestic market and $715 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $877 million against it's $95 million budget.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Granny for being a Cool Old Lady and a walking Moment of Funny.
  • Flynn. Being also Laughably Evil and played by Nick Frost helps.
  • Squint. A Crazy Is Cool Pint-Sized Powerhouse that could probably give Buck a run for his money.
• Evil Is Cool: Captain Gutt. A pirate Gigantopithecus voiced by Peter Dinklage. If there is one thing fans generally agree on, it’s that Captain Gutt was an awesome villain, with some even calling him the best villain to come out of this franchise, thanks to his cool design, him striking a seamless balance between being funny and charming as well as ruthless and menacing, him being a legitimate threat to the herd and Peter Dinklage’s great vocal performance. It also helps that he’s an active threat throughout the movie, unlike most other Ice Age villains. What's not to love here?
• Fanon: It's also become extremely common to see fanfic writers have Diego and Shira use the terms “Kitty” and “Softy”, respectively, as pet names for each other.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Its domestic gross of $161.3 Million was lower than that of even the first movie ($176.4 Million), but its international gross of of $715.9 Million was slightly ahead of the third's movie's gross of $690.1 Million.
  • The movie got mixed-to-positive reviews among Latin American audiences and is still fondly remember among certain sectors thanks to the dub being a Fountain of Memes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Louis the molehog, Peaches' best friend, is voiced by Josh Gad. One year later, Gad would voice another ice-related character: Olaf the snowman in Disney's Frozen (2013).
  • Captain Gutt could be considered Playing Against Type if you only know Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones.
  • Speaking of, that a dangerous animal pirate likes to sing a song with the phrase "It's Me" being quite notable at the end? Really does feel like something a certain fox robot would sing...
  • We have Manny trying to break the sirens' trance by singing "The Candyman", which happened in the DreamWorks Animation movie Madagascar. This would later head in the opposite direction, with the Running Gag of Squint (the rabbit on Gutt's crew) being called the Easter Bunny... which would become a thing in DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians.
• Inferred Holocaust: How many animals died during the great earthquake that literally broke the valley apart? How many were killed by the massive wall of land that erupted from the ground and stretched for miles? The movie glosses over this, but there is no way all the valley animals survived the continental crack-up.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Captain Gutt is a nasty piece of work, being an cruel Killer Gorilla who seeks revenge against Manny over rather petty reasons which ends up in an attempt on killing his family, not to mention his poor treatment of Shira, however he's so delightfully charming and hilarious that's very hard to hate him (besides a Love to Hate way). The same can not be said about Peaches and the rest of the teenage mammoths, who were despised by audiences for being little more that walking jerkish teen stereotypes with Ethan being a Jerk Jock and Steffie being an Alpha Bitch, Peaches trying to join the group by denying Louis's friendship (even if she ends up regretting it) doesn't exactly make her more popular that the other two.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Did anyone believe Ellie, Peaches, and all the other valley animals really died?
• Moe: Louis the molehog. His big Puppy-Dog Eyes enhance his cuteness.
• Moral Event Horizon: Captain Gutt crosses it by coming dangerously close to murdering Manny's family in cold blood just to get back at him.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Peaches's characterization as an obnoxious teenager that's basically a copy and paste of any teen sitcom cliches is the characterization she's mostly remembered for. This is despite the following movie and the Easter Special gave her a more mature personality and was shown to even be a much nicer person than the way she was in this movie. Granted it doesn't help that the parts of the franchise where she's portrayed more positively are the ones the fandom prefers to ignore.
  • Sid is far from the sharpest tool in the sheed but his detractors tend to point to the scene where he ignores Diego's warning and eats the lotus berry and gets paralized as proof he's the most useless character ever often ignoring all the other times he has being helpful to the Herd or the fact he didn't do anything as idiotic as this before this movie.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Shira + Diego = Shego, though the pairing is more commonly known on ff.net as "Dira."
• The Scrappy:
  • Initially, a good many viewers disliked adolescent Peaches due to her subplot being pretty much a copy and paste of a million teen sitcom cliches. Luckily, her Character Development in the next film pulled her out of the Scrappy heap.
  • Ethan and Steffie don’t have many fans, due to being little more than gratuitous cool kid stereotypes who incite Peaches’ tedious, paint-by-numbers teen sitcom subplot, which just takes time away from focusing on Manny, Sid and Diego's feud with the pirates.
• Strangled by the Red String: Diego and Shira's romance wasn't built up much, happens way too quickly, and unlike Manny and Ellie, they do not share any intimate emotional scenes that could grow Shira (or Diego) as characters through their romance but instead spend most of the time snapping at each other until Shira randomly decides to side with the herd. Heck, Shira remains an entirely one-dimensional Love Interest throughout the film, something that sticks out like a sore thumb when one compares how well Ellie was written in The Meltdown.
• Take That, Scrappy!: This is the only movie in the franchise that seems to be aware of how annoying Crash and Eddie are. Not only is their screentime reduced in comparison to all the other sequels but every time they appear, one character will lampshade how useless everyone else perceives them. Louis even mentions how he believes they are the only ones who would not survive the Continental Drift with the duo themselves blatantly making clear they, themselves, know how stupid they are.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The rest of Gutt's crew besides Gutt, Flynn, Shira, and Squint don't get any development/fleshing out and are mostly there to be muscle for Gutt (and even Flynn, Shira, and Squint remain largely one-note), also wasting some talented actors like Rebel Wilson and Kunal Nayyar. Given his jolly nature and Minion with an F in Evil status, Flynn could have easily performed a Heel–Face Turn.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • After Dawn of The Dinosaurs ignored the plot point of more mammoths being alive. This movie brings more mammoths living in the same village as the Herd. What story possibilities would bring the main herd interacting with other mammoths? A teenage drama about becoming popular, of course!
  • The premise of Manny, Sid, and Diego being lost at sea, separated from the herd, and fighting pirates while trying to get back home had lots of potential to be an exciting adventure. It not only offered a good excuse for having the original trio be on their own again but after being shanghaied, they could have spent more time with Gutt’s crew, allowing the other pirates to be fleshed out more as characters, as well as giving more development to the romance between Diego and Shira, thus making the latter’s Defecting for Love arc feel more organic, before escaping and having further adventures while being hounded by the vengeful pirates. Unfortunately, that awesome premise was underutilized due to the movie constantly cutting back to Peaches’ woefully predictable subplot that feels more at home in a Disney Channel sitcom than an Ice Age movie, along with all the superfluous and cliché characters it brought with it, overcrowding the film and taking attention away from the main plot.
  • Ellie becoming the leader of the evacuated village had potential to be an decently interesting subplot but that plot point is rarely touched upon on.

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