Cinema 2011 #36: Rio

If you’re willing to lower your expectations, Rio offers the chance to get swept up in bubble-gum family fun, charming you with its bright colours, manic energy and samba beats. Featuring a star vocal cast (Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Jamie Foxx, will.i.am, and many, many more), this animated feature has its heart firmly in place, but its lack of highbrow humour leaves it wallowing, albeit beautifully rendered, on the jungle floor.

Telling the story of a neurotic Macaw named Blu, whose fledgling frolics in the Brazilian rainforest are cut short by poachers, the film kicks off with a lavish musical set piece, setting out the beautifully bright animation and zesty soundtrack. Finding himself in Mooselake, Minnesota, Blu (voiced with jittery zeal by Eisenberg, whose wavering pubescent tones lend themselves perfectly to the precious pet), Blu’s taken in and grows up living a sheltered life with his definition bookish (geeky, big glasses, ginger, sells books) companion, Linda. Then he’s whisked off to Rio by a birdbrained scientist with the hope of getting him to mate with Jewel, the last of his kind. If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because Pixar was going to make a better version of it, but instead the mantle falls on director Carlos Saldanha to bring these two lovebirds together.

Rio takes a rather light-hearted approach to its storytelling, allowing an endless conveyor belt of cutesy critters to pack every scene. Blu and Jewel, the feisty Latin female who sounds a lot like an all-American Anne Hathaway, make for a likeable, if endlessly predictable, will-they/won’t-they pairing, and there is great fun to be had at Flight of the Concords Jermaine Clement’s theatrical turkey of a villain. The scenes of the glorious Rio Carnaval are rhythmically robust and vivid, and there’s even an attempt to balance out Brazil’s notorious party town with glimpses of the impoverished favelas, but given its kiddie credentials, obviously City of God it ain’t.  

Rio is certified G, and perhaps General is the best way to describe it. The jokes are easy, slapstick affairs, which will leave kiddies chuckling, and the occasional gem of a sight-gag will stop parents resorting to psychotropic drugs to endure the merry-go-round fowl-based farce. Coming from the creative forces behind Ice Age, and the scriptwriter behind such œuvres as Big Momma’s House and Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London, the film is insubstantial compared to the digital heavy hitters that have already come this year, but Rio has enough artistic merit, given its pretty visuals and musical tempo, to make it worth a gander on an April afternoon.

2½ Likes.