I like to use my 2 1/2-year-old son as a barometer for animated kid’s movies. At home he’s a connoisseur of child-friendly entertainment. He’s a huge fan of Despicable Me, but he’s also keen on old Peanuts movies, along with anything released by Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro is his absolute favorite). So, when I take him to a movie like Rio 2 and he’s completely tuned out after 20 minutes into the movie, wandering the aisles to find something more exciting to pay attention to, I know there’s something terribly wrong.
And so it goes with Rio 2, a beautifully animated kid’s movie defunct of anything that may make it special. Instead it recycles enough of the plot from Fern Gully to be called derivative, but doesn’t create enough new interest to be considered a success. It’s perfectly content with its forgettable songs, brainless dialogue, and bland predictability. If it couldn’t hold the attention of a nearly 3-year-old, how much of a chance do you think it has to bore every adult in the audience?
Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) is a stuttering blue macaw. In the first Rio we learned that Blu was one of two blue macaw’s left. So, he was flown to Rio de Janeiro to mate with the last female blue macaw, Jewel (Anne Hathaway). Time has passed and now Blu and Jewel are the parents to three rambunctious youngsters, because whenever animated movies get sequels the chances that kids are introduced to the relationship increase substantially (see: Shrek).
Blu and his family, living comfortably in a nature preserve, have become domesticated. Even his daughter is carrying around an iPod, impossibly fitting the headphones into her tiny bird ear holes somehow. Jewel isn’t satisfied with this life. She’s afraid her family is losing that special something that makes wildlife wild. When their human protectors, Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) and Linda (Leslie Mann), expedition into the heart of the Amazon jungle, Jewel sees it as an opportunity to get her family’s wild instincts back.
If Rio 2 is a hit at the box office, you’ll no doubt hear about how it’s an environmentalist ploy to indoctrinate your children with tree-hugging tendencies. Yes, Rio 2 is about a larger aspect of unnecessarily cutting down rainforests and illegal logging operations — a decent lesson for the kids, but one that is lost in the muddy mediocrity surrounding it.
There is one highlight in the movie, and that’s the cold-hearted, tattered old cockatoo Nigel (Jemaine Clement). He was the bright moment in the first movie, and he continues his strangle hold on the only interesting part of this one too. It’s to the point where one wonders why the Rio movies weren’t simply centered around him. Are we not to the point where we can focus kid’s entertainment on anti-heroes? Not only is Nigel the only character with any sort of life, he’s also the only character with a decent song. All the other songs in Rio 2 are “Top of the Pops”-like fluff. Nigel’s song, however, is a brilliant blend of pop music and Clement’s “Flight of the Conchord” roots.
Unsure of how to end the movie, the music starts swelling as an animated music video bids us adieu. Whenever an animated movie ends with a song-and-dance number it’s a not so subtle indication that the entire movie went nowhere fast; a way to fit one more song on the soundtrack and brush aside any dramatic character resolutions that could’ve benefited had they had the chance to develop in the first place. Rio 2 is just another bright, colorful distraction for the kiddies, and another money-waster for their parents.
