Beautiful but Stereotyped

Rating: 7/10 (3 May 2011)

I'd rate this movie a 10, but the prejudice it displays prevents me to do so.
There is a recent trend in the movie business to tell stories about Rio de Janeiro's slums. Such is the case of the last Hulk movie, a good part of which was set in the Rocinha slum.
Not everything in Rio de Janeiro is a slum. There are slums everywhere, as there are high, middle and low class, non-slum neighborhoods.
And not all bad things in Rio happens within slums. Bad and good people live in and out of slums. So "Rio" displays double prejudice, about Rio de Janeiro city as a whole - it's much more than slums - and about the slum's inhabitants - bad people exist inside and outside the slums.
Of course, no movie about Rio could forget Carnaval and football. That's OK. I'd just add that Carnaval doesn't happen only in the Sambodromo or in the slums.
As for the rest: (a) The story is pure fantasy, where animals think and act as humans in disguise. But this is what fables are for: conveying human messages in a playful way. (b) Rio de Janeiro is pretty accurate geographically, except for the remote, jungle airport from which the bad guys take off to take the stolen, hero birds away, as there is no such airport anywhere near this city.
Please, film-makers: when you consider making a movie about Rio, try to provide a balanced instead of a prejudiced, biased view of my worldly famous "Wonder City".