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.
