GazerRise Fantastic!

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Ole Sandbaek Joergensen This film is great, it has a lot of things going for it, the very rich details in the landscapes and the characters, but also the colors, voices, jokes and story.I saw it with my wife and kids, and even though the youngest one could sit still all the time, she still loved it and thought it was great.I especially liked the details, I haven't been to Rio, but I can imagine this gives very rich overview of the city. The colors and "effects" where very great, and it brought this film all the way out in the theater hall. I also liked the very rich animal life, I mean there where a lot of different animals in this movie and that spiced it up and gave it life. It has a lot of imagination and characteristic just like all the different characters had in Ice Age.

Horst in Translation ([email protected]) But you could probably guessed that with the film's title. The writer and director Carlos Saldanha made this a nice feature about his home country. Topics like football, carnival and the rain forest are included, but there are also references to more serious aspects, such as orphan boys living in the slums of Rio or crime in general. Still as this is an animated feature and thus the target audience are mostly younger people, there is nothing too severe in here. The main character is a cookie-eating coffee-drinking blue macaw and we find out he is the one of only two specimen of his kind. The problem, however, is that he is so domesticated by his owner that he cannot even fly and so his trip to Brazil where he meets the other, a female (obviously) who is the exact opposite of him, is full of danger, adventure and a love story. Oh wait, there is actually another love story in there as his owner, a young woman, falls for a wildlife preservationist. The movie starts very nicely with "Real in Rio", the song that managed an Oscar nomination and made up for the film coming short in the Animated Feature category.I quite enjoyed this movie. There are many funny scenes in it from start to finish and Blu and Jewel (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway) just like the two humans are quite a joy to watch. However, I have to say almost all other characters did not do too much for me and I believe this film could have been more essential and better without a couple of them. This way, it would probably not have been 100, but only 85 minutes, but I would have approved of that. There are some emotional moments, like when Blu and Jewel discover their love for one another or the two humans do in their macaw costumes, but as a whole it does not reach the emotional heights of Pixar movies. That is not to say it's a disappointing movie. It's lots of fun and the 7(!) people who worked on the script did a fine job all in all. Saldanha also directed the equally fun sequel from a year ago and I am curious if they will ever make a third movie. If yes, I will probably give it a watch. Until then, I recommend this first Rio movie of the franchise.

fred-beermaster It has been a long time since I saw such a bad, bad movie. I can not say anything bad about the animation, for it has been done with great skill and finesse, but the story line is more than bad. American ignorance and chauvinism reign throughout the whole movie and I was hardly able to watch more than a quarter of the movie.Portraying Brazil as evil, poor, dumb and what not .. while glorifying the so called American dream by using one cliché after the other.This movie is not funny, not entertaining and very, very bad. I hate it. And trust me, I tried watching it, but it was all really too much.Shame on the makers.

tebot Although the animation of this film is most excellent, one has to wonder about the timing. The biggest issue with having the Olympic games in Rio is the crime and corruption. It makes it seem as the major source of crime is bird smuggling, except for the pickpocket monkeys. They show Rio with clean streets and friendly people. The only people in Rio that are friendly are the grifters (the con artists). One also needs to remember that Rio is in Brazil. That's where the corrupt government has allowed so much of the rain forest to be decimated. Then there's the fact that Brazil is the country that helped hide all the Nazi's after WW2. Now you wonder how a film like this comes along and makes Rio look like heaven. MONEY!!!