Rio Talkback

[Ookamikun]

It's... actually pretty decent. It's no Rango, but it's leaps and bounds better than Hop (no pun intended).

I like how the male and female characters don't follow the "male = dumb and female = smart". Here, the two are actually balanced in presentation. Jewel, the female lead, is street smart but is rash and arrogant, whereas Blu, while naive on the outside world, is actually pretty book smart and uses it a lot, and is even a great climber.

I wish the two birds didn't appear in the movie. At all. That yellow bird with a soda cap and the slightly bigger bird with a red head, I mean.

I like how they pretty much nailed that Rio is in fact in Brazil... in a sense that the characters who speak in English makes sense - the Brazilian ornithologist is well... an ornithologist, and the smugglers are smugglers, so English or other foreign language is a must. We've seen a bunch of background characters who thoroughly speak Portuguese with little hints of English. With that said, I don't get it how the kid could speak English, being a street urchin.

The plot's pretty basic, but it's still all right. Also, Linda in her Carnaval outfit.

[CatChancey]

I haven't seen it yet, but it's getting good review (87% with 31 reviews on RT). I'm somewhat surprised since I automatically assume that every new cartoon franchise will fall flat.

I really like the way this movie looks, though. The character designs (minus the humans, but that nearly every CGI film) are really good - my favorite is Jamie Foxx's character with the bottlecap hat - and the visuals are colorful and stylized without being distractingly so.

Something that was brought up on IMDB was that there isn't a real Oscar shoe-in this year since Pixar's offering is a sequel to their weakest movie. I wouldn't be surprised if Rio gets a nom there.

[Ookamikun]

Oh and they did their research, like in the first Ice Age film.