 ***PLEASE NOTE: A Blu-ray 3D disc is only compatible with 3D Blu-ray players.*** Tagline: 1 out of every 8 Americans is afraid of flying. Most of them don't have feathers. Feel the rhythm...hear the beat...and let your spirit soar with this 4-Disc Edition of Rio - with more music, more dancing and more fun for the whole family! This high-flying animated comedy from the makers of Ice Age features an all-star cast that includes the voice talents of Anne Hathaway, Jesse Eisenberg, George Lopez and Jamie Foxx. Blu (Eisenberg) is a rare domesticated macaw who believes he's the last of his kind. But when his owner learns about Jewel (Hathaway), Blu's female counterpart in Rio de Janeiro, they set out on the adventure of a lifetime. Even though he's never learned to fly, Blu befriends a group of wise-cracking, smooth-talking city birds who help him find the courage to spread his wings and follow his destiny. Storyline: In Rio de Janeiro, baby macaw, Blu, is captured by dealers and smuggled to the USA. While driving through Moose Lake, Minnesota, the truck that is transporting Blu accidentally drops Blu's box on the road. A girl, Linda, finds the bird and raises him with love. Fifteen years later, Blu is a domesticated and intelligent bird that does not fly and lives a comfortable life with bookshop owner Linda. Out of the blue, clumsy Brazilian ornithologist, Tulio, visits Linda and explains that Blu is the last male of his species, and he has a female called Jewel in Rio de Janeiro. He invites Linda to bring Blu to Rio so that he and Jewel can save their species. Linda travels with Blu and Tulio to Rio de Janeiro and they leave Blu and Jewel in a large cage in the institute where Tulio works. While they are having dinner, smugglers break into the institute and steal Blu and Jewel to sell them. Linda and Tulio look everywhere for Blu, who is chained to Jewel and hidden in a slum. Meanwhile, Jewel ... Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, August 5, 2011 -- I've decided I'm going to exhaust all my bird-related puns/metaphors in one go so as not to subject you to them for any longer than necessary. Ready? Alright, here goes, I'm just going to wing it: Rio is a featherweight, talon-less CGI lark that never heads south or goes fowl--it's no turkey--but it rarely ventures out on a limb to stand out from the summer blockbuster flock, and it flaps around for an hour and a half without ever taking flight. It's hardly eggcellent, but it's not horwrendous--at times, it's quite pheasant--and I certainly don't, uh, egret watching it. I know, I know, I'm a dodo. Now that that's out of my system, feel free to write me hate mail or, if you must, ostrich-ize me. I'm no chicken; I can swallow my pride and take a good grousing. Sorry. So, so, so sorry. Anyway, Rio. What I said above, in the most obnoxious way possible, is pretty much how I feel about 20th Century Fox's latest animated adventure from Blue Sky Studios, the CGI production house that gave us the Ice Age franchise and 2008's Dr. Seuss adaptation, Horton Hears a Who! Blue Sky was initially touted as a Pixar-killer, but none of the studio's features have come close to approaching--let alone surpassing--Pixar's high storytelling standards. Rio is no different. It's fun summertime fluff, and it's definitely easy on the eyes, but it's grounded by a leaden plot and disposable characters. Rio tells the story of Blu (Jesse Eisenberg), a hapless, cerulean-hued macaw who was smuggled out of Brazil and into America as a chick-- before he ever learned to fly--and sold to Linda, an owlish little girl in snowy Moose Lake, Minnesota. Years later, at the bookstore adult Linda (Leslie Mann) owns, an ornithologist named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) shows up with an unexpected proposition. As it turns out, Blu is one of two remaining blue macaws in the world, and Tulio wants to fly him down to Rio de Janeiro to, shall we say, propagate his species with Jewel (Anne Hathaway), the last female specimen. So, yes, this children's movie is basically about bird sex--when you get down to the nitty gritty of it--but, of course, it's been tidily sanitized for family consumption. (On a related note, I'm still waiting for a crassly satirical, Meet the Feebles-style R-rated CGI adventure. Surprise me, Hollywood.) When Blu arrives in Rio, the sassy, independent, and patently uninterested Jewel spurns his kissy-faced advances, but the two are soon rendered literally inseparable after Marcel (Carlos Ponce), a dread-headed and goateed smuggler, steals them from the aviary--with the help of a cute orphaned street kid--and chains their feet together. Cuffed and initially at odds, Blu and Jewel eventually manage to escape, pursued by Marcel's dumb-as-dirt henchmen and his psychotic parrot, Nigel (Jemaine Clement), a plumed cockatoo who, as he tells us in a Flight of the Conchords-inspired musical interlude, likes to "poop on people and blame it on seagulls." Believe it or not, Nigel is the film's best character, devious, maniacal, and the closest Rio comes to having any kind of danger. There's really not much of a story here. Blu and Jewel traipse around Rio, trying to get unchained and falling for each other in the process, while Linda and Tulio tool around town on a motorbike, getting love pangs themselves while they look for the lost birds. Between the rom-com predictability, the usual anthropomorphized animal hijinks, and the big-but-generic musical numbers, there's nothing about Rio that's particularly surprising. It's varied and fast-paced, but its characters feel like afterthoughts and there are no emotional highs or lows, just an even, relatively drama-less plane with some nice scenery and a few good sight gags. And this is where Blue Sky loses out to Pixar time after time--the studio doesn't back technical proficiency with a story worth caring about. Jessie Eisenberg's Blu is a dull protagonist, and while Anne Hathaway gets to display a bit more range voicing Jewel, they're both just going through the inoffensive, mildly entertaining commercial kid movie motions. Likewise, the supporting vocal cast members--including George Lopez as a mentoring toucan, Tracy Morgan as a drooling bulldog, and Will.i.am and Jamie Foxx as a pair of suave local birds--are good but have underwritten, so-what roles. It's not that Rio is unlikeable, it's just not very memorable. It's like a pretty postcard with a hastily written message; you look at it once and chuck it in a desk drawer, never to be seen again. That said, the movie definitely deserves credit for what it does do right. With a score by John Powell and incidental music supervised by living legend Sérgio Mendes, the film is carried and propelled along by nearly non-stop samba rhythms, recalling the best film about Rio de Janeiro, Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus. The climactic carnaval sequence--a chase through the parade--is beautifully and kinetically executed, and the happy-ever-after ending, while as rote as they come, at least avoids going too dippily saccharine. At best, the film is a cheery, lazy summer blockbuster vacation. It doesn't require you to do or even feel anything; you're just supposed to lay back, relax, and soak it all in. Fittingly, the film's CGI palette is so bright, you'll feel like you've got a suntan just watching it. Rio is middle-of-the-road family-friendly CGI fare, with barely-there characters and a story that can't have taken the film's menagerie of screenwriters more than an hour to dream up. Still, it's got great music, eye-popping visuals, and the target under-10 audience will probably eat it right up. If you have a 3D-capable television or think you might ever purchase one, this is the version of the film to get, as it includes a 3D disc, the regular 2D Blu-ray, a DVD, and a digital copy, all for marginally more than what you'd pay for the standard edition. As you've come to expect from these kinds of films, the audio/video presentation is fantastic, and while watching in 3D is hardly essential to the enjoyment of the film, Rio's bright color scheme lends itself well to the format. Cast Notes: Karen Disher (Mother Bird [voice]), Jason Fricchione (Truck Driver [voice]), Sofia Scarpa Saldanha (Young Linda [voice]), Leslie Mann (Linda [voice]), Kelly Keaton (Bookstore Customer / Lady Tourist [voice]), Jesse Eisenberg (Blu [voice]), Wanda Sykes (Chloe [The Goose] [voice]), Jane Lynch (Alice [The Other Goose] [voice]), Rodrigo Santoro (Tulio / Soccer Announcer [voice]), Gracinha Leporace (Dr. Barbosa [voice]), Jamie Foxx (Nico [voice]), Will i Am (Pedro [voice] [as will.i.am]), Phil Miler (Aviary Intern / Waiter [voice]), Anne Hathaway (Jewel [voice]), Bernardo de Paula (Sylvio / Kipo [voice]). IMDb Rating (11/25/11): 7.0/10 from 38,976 users
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