It’s a toga party at the Tiki Room. In the first minutes of Rio, the new animated feature from 20th Century Fox’s Blue Sky studio, the 3-D screen explodes in a riot of tropical plumage. A thousand species of birds in the Amazonian rain forest sing and soar, fanning out into a kaleidoscope of formations, as if choreographed by a Brazilian Busby Berkeley. The viewers’ spirits rise with them, for here is a splashy display of the innocent, artful exuberance that, these days, the directors of live-action films have left to the guys with pixels.
The opening scene of Rio is an Eden before the fall. Poachers have infiltrated the rain forest and capture all manner of rare birds for sale up North to zoos, private owners and maybe epicures. “Plucked, stuffed, eaten — who cares?” says one of the miscreants. “All I know is, we’re gonna be rich.” It will take the rest of the movie for the natural order to be restored. But that doesn’t mean that most of the birds can’t have fun while they’re waiting for the happy ending of director Carlos Saldanha’s cheerful, colorful, high-flying romp.
One of the kidnapped avians is an infant blue macaw named Blu
