Young kids will probably love “Rio,” a colorful, tuneful, action-packed animated feature with a Brazilian setting. But I have a feeling that older audience members will, like me, be getting restless during this celebrity-voice-driven, generically plotted variation on “Madagascar.”
It’s a mild disappointment coming from Blue Sky, the animation studio that’s had enormous success in the entertaining middle ground between Pixar’s masterpieces and the increasingly crass ‘toons from DreamWorks. With its three popular “Ice Age” movies, Blue Sky avoided hackneyed plotting and used star voices sparingly to support often ingenious visuals.
“Rio,” which has far fewer inspired character designs than its predecessors, centers on a rare macaw named Blu (voiced, rather monotonously, by Jesse Eisenberg) who’s abducted from his rain-forest home and rescued by a young girl from a street in Minnesota.
Fifteen years later, his now-adult owner (Leslie Mann) is visited by a nerdy scientist from Brazil (Rodrigo Santoro) who’s somehow tracked down Blu. He persuades her to bring her pet to Brazil so Blu can mate with the only other survivor of the species.
The conspicuously American Anne Hathaway voices the Brazilian-raised female bird, Jewel, who’s more interested in escaping from the bird sanctuary where she lives than in getting horizontal with Blu.
Then they’re chained together and kidnapped by a street urchin working for a band of bird smugglers.
What follows is an ultra-predictable series of escapes and chases through the streets of Rio — Blu has never learned to fly, a gag driven into the ground — and eventually the skies above.
There are also Lionel Ritchie jokes — a moratorium, please, on those — and an endless parade of charmless sidekicks voiced by multiethnic celebrities such as George Lopez, Jamie Foxx and will.i.am.
The only character who makes much of an impression is a crazed, cannibalistic cockatoo voiced by Jemaine Clement (“Flight of the Conchords”), who gets the best of the handful of musical numbers. His performance, like the not-bad songs, often seems to be taking place in another movie altogether.
Director Carlos Saldanha, who helmed the second and third “Ice Age” features, redeems himself somewhat with a climax set during Rio’s Carnival, which features some impressive crowd images.
If you take the kids, you can save some money by avoiding the 3-D version, in which the bright colors are dimmed by wearing glasses. Like most animated features, “Rio” doesn’t make much use of stereoscopic imagery — except for one inspired sight gag involving the city’s landmark statue of Christ the Redeemer.