Rio

Rating: 8/10 (16 April 2011)

This Blue-Sky studio animation is a genuine energizer for the spring time here in Shanghai, saw the 3D-version in the cinema and even one week before its northern America release.
The fun is literally tangible, although the whole story is a standard mainstream Hollywood product, the twist-and-turn is perfectly calculated to meet the expectations of both children and adult audience, which sadly enough though, also means that it is too naive to believe in something surprisingly overjoyed would occur. There is no doubt this one will grab tons of money in the market and further set up a great mouth-of-praise for Blue-sky Studio and shows the world beside ICE AGE franchise, they are truly capable of being a potential competitor of Pixar.
The 3D effect is more like an appendix due to the fact that the all the adorable characters alone is sufficient to keep us embedded in our seats for a fleeting 90 minutes, the Rio de Janeiro location and Carnival also help to relish the whole process.
The voice cast is superb especially Jesse Eisenberg, his distinctively geeky register and drumfire speed is the highlight, by comparison, Anne Hathaway's tone is nothing particular, sidekicks Will i Am and Jamie Foxx attribute their competent effort in rapping and singing respectively.
I call it an almost-perfect-manufactured animation, however, RIO is not valiant enough to bring any groundbreaking revolution into the status-quo (as it had the chance to do so), for example, eventually our unusual non-flying macaw Blu has to accomplish the final rescue of his apple-of-the-eye by taking his first flying and the epiphany comes just on time! Why not keep Blu as a unique as he is? You don't need to do anything to prove to be who you are, right? Because you are who you are! So for me the most memorable quote in the film is I HATE SAMBA, BECAUSE THEY ALL SOUND SAME TO ME! This is golden, I wish I could iterate the same thing about nowadays mainstream films.