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Blu and his pals in the animated film Rio now playing in time the holiday weekend.

By Maggie Scott
As it is put in the latest animated comedy/romance, Rio, “stop yapping, start flapping” your way to the nearest theatre and check out this tropical treat from director Carlos Saldanha and the CGI whizzes who brought you the clever Ice Age films.
Rio’s colorful carnival and Brazil’s lush avian species are truly inspirational to the artists of 20th Century Fox Animation, who sweeten your viewing deal with a scintillating bon bon before the main event.
That most uproariously unlucky of rodents, Scrat, causes ancient land masses to split into continents in his latest pursuit of the elusive acorn.  Moving from his icy realm, the screen opens onto a kaleidoscope of rainbow-hued feathered life swooping through the morning light-tinged trees of the forest outside Rio.
This is the home of Blu (voice of Jesse Eisenberg), a baby blue Macaw, soon to be poached and parted from his own kind before he can even learn to fly.  His crate rudely deposited in the snow of Moose Lake, Minnesota, by a sliding Exotic Pets delivery truck, the quivering Blu is rescued by Linda (voice of Leslie Mann). She’s  a bright pre-teen, who spends the next 12 years lavishing BFF love on the flightless bird, who makes a dazzling mascot for Linda’s Blue Macaw Bookstore.
One day, Tulio (voice of Rodrigo Santoro), an ornithologist, comes to call; informing Linda that Blu is the last male Macaw of his kind.  To ensure the survival of the breed, Blu must breed—with Jewel, the last female.  The first date is a bit of a bust, with Jewel (voice of Anne Hathaway) intent on busting out of her confinement in the Rio research lab’s simulated environment.
From his awkward attitude and impotent wings, to his affection for humans that Jewel has learned to mistrust, there’s not much about this earthbound bird to stimulate her nesting instinct.  All it will take are smugglers, a teen orphan from the slums, a slobbering bulldog, a matchmaking toucan, two hip urban birds of indeterminate species and the magic of the city to make it happen.  While there are plenty of virtuoso visual gags to hold adults’ interest, all the standard character and plot elements of this genre (the bumbling sidekick villains, the evil animal accomplices) are in place to ensure a merely modest quotient of dramatic merit.
Environmental and social messages are dialed down so low as to be barely detectable—presumably to keep the story at a level tolerable and comprehensible to the average four-year-old.  The voice-over and vocal talents of Hathaway and Eisenberg and such celebrities as George Lopez, Tracy Morgan, Jamie Foxx, Jane Lynch and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas vary in quality; making Ms. Mann’s consistently superior performance the most appealing.  Rated G.

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