Very entertaining, beautifully animated bird movie.

Rating: Null/10 (16 August 2011)

On successive nights we saw two recent animated movies, "Rango" and "Rio." Both have excellent voice acting and stunningly good animation. Rio is brighter, more colorful, my wife enjoyed it more. While I enjoyed both of them, my preference tips a bit towards 'Rango."
But I really enjoyed RIO. It starts in Brazil when animal smugglers are illegally trapping various species of wildlife. A pretty blue one ends up falling off a truck in Minnesota, and becomes a lady's pet.
Some years later an ornithologist from Brazil, looking for the rare blue Macaw, comes upon the bird, now an adult named Blu, and tries to convince the owner that they need to travel to Rio de Janeiro to hopefully mate with the last know female blue Macaw. They are reluctant but finally go.
Most of the movie takes place in Rio, and Jesse Eisenberg voices Blu. Anne Hathaway voices Jewel, the female.
In Rio they have many adventures and more than their share of misadventures, but in the end ... I wonder if Blu and Jewel actually get together? (wink, wink)
SPOILERS: Yes, they do eventually escape capture and/or death several times. Well they don't really escape capture, but they figure out how to escape, even when chained together and Blu never learned to fly! But in the end he is the hero, and Blu and Jewel have a brand new litter of little blue Macaws.