Rio is a film that comfortably perches on autopilot

Rating: 6/10 (1 May 2011)

Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) is a talking baby macaw, who is taken from his habitat in Brazil and smuggled in a box to the United States. Falling off the back of a truck, he is given a home by Linda (Leslie Mann). They grow up together in a domestic environment and by copying her he never learns how to fly properly. Years later and a scientist named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) finds Linda working in a bookstore. He tells her that Blu is one the last of his kind and that he should be taken back to Brazil briefly so that he can mate with a female macaw. Linda reluctantly agrees. When placed in a cage Blu meets Jewel (Anne Hathaway), a feisty bird who is intent of escaping and is impatient to Blu's dithering. When the breeding facility is raided by smugglers, Blu and Jewel are caught and chained together in a cage. They have to learn to work together so that they can escape and find Blu's owner again.
Rio is a film that comfortably perches on autopilot. It's a Twentieth Century Fox film that ticks all the boxes for a modern day animated picture. It's occasionally funny, visually inspired and harmlessly entertaining. But watching this we remember how spoilt we are by Pixar's consistency. First-rate animation can no longer compensate for second- string narratives. Small children will be unfazed but adults will find Rio's screenplay, credited to four people no less, to be pretty mechanical. The plot is very loosely tied together through some slapstick chase sequences and equally exaggerated human characters. The humans here lack the deep emotional resonance that we've come to appreciate in recent years. They're quirky but superfluous compared to the film's cute animal characters. The slapstick comedy too will also seem dated and immature to anyone but very small children. The film is quietly funny when it's firing off its sometimes witty dialogue. Eisenberg is a very obvious choice for a neurotic but it's a part he's accustomed to. He finds a few laughs in his enthusiastic delivery of Blue's hysteria. And as expected, the film is handsomely animated. Brazil is an inspired location because of its life and its vibrancy. Rio capitalises on this through its joyous use of primary colours, which enrich the environments and characters on the screen. I enjoyed the subtle touches of animation too, like the expression on Blu's face when he mimes the words to a Lionel Richie song. On whether to see the film is 3D or not: leave the glasses at home. The film is barely ninety minutes long and any additional depth to screen is largely unnoticeable. It's not worth paying the extra dollars. The picture quality would be even more colourful in 2D, without the glasses absorbing the light. While Rio is a film that does little wrong, it does remind us how high the bar has been raised for animation. Given the limited use of the 3D, there would be little lost in saving this for a rental.