I don’t have much experience reviewing children’s movies, so, before writing this, I did some research to glean a few of the points prescient to their reviews. Fortunately the standard kid-flick critique doesn’t differ much from your standard, well, non-kid-flick review. The only theme uniting them all is to note whether adults will enjoy it as much as their brood (or whether either audience will enjoy it).
So let’s get that out of the way: The kids will probably enjoy it (the ones invited to my screening didn’t make too much noise, but that may have been due to the iron fists of their handlers); adults won’t mind it. Rio isn’t particularly sophisticated and comes with your basic (and I use this term only because it does very much apply here) cookie-cutter plot in which you already know everything that’s going to happen within the first 12 minutes, and, beyond that, there’s not a whole lot else—save for the location shots, which I’ll get to in a moment.
The story is that Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) is a rare Spix macaw, taken from his homeland of Brazil when he was a chick and shipped to Moose Lake, Minnesota, where his crate falls off the back of the truck and he’s adopted by Linda (Leslie Mann), a bookish girl who raises him over the next 15 years. Linda doesn’t make many friends in that time, but she does open a bookstore, and the story proper begins when Tulio (Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro), a bird scientist, drops by to inform Linda that Blu is one of the last of his species and must go to Brazil to mate with Jewel (Anne Hathaway), the other last of the species.
Ice Age director Chris Wedge has been tapped to helm Leaf Men, an animated feature that Fox will release through its Fox Animation label, with Blue Sky Studios producing.
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