There are moments of glory, or at least glorious color, in Rio, an animated 3D adventure about a domesticated macaw living in Minnesota who suddenly finds himself on the loose in Rio de Janeiro. The opening, set in a Brazilian rainforest, is a floor-show extravaganza: All manner of winged creatures in unreal colors -- the flaming orange of Mercurochrome, the outer-space blue of artificially colored popsicles -- dip and sweep among the trees. A troupe of flying parrots execute a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley routine. It's from this polychrome paradise that our macaw friend is snatched while still just a chick, eventually ending up as the happy pet of a protective little girl.
There's a lot going on in that opening sequence -- maybe too much. Rio has its charms, among them an acceptably catchy Brazilian-pop soundtrack and a few appealing characters (chief among them a drooly bulldog voiced by Tracy Morgan), not to mention those glorious colors. But at times it's just too much of a good thing. Rio, especially when watched in 3D, is rambunctious and big, one of those costly, technically sophisticated family entertainments that wears both its price tag and its eagerness to entertain on its sleeve. (The picture comes to us from Blue Sky Studios, makers of the Ice Age movies.) There's something or someone hopping, running, bouncing, singing or flying just about every minute, and while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it does make you wonder: It may take a village to raise a kid, but do we really need an army to entertain one?
The plot starts out rather simply: Its macaw hero is named Blu (Jesse Eisenberg supplies his voice), and his lifelong owner is Linda (Leslie Mann), a meek bookstore owner -- she didn't buy him from a pet store, but rather rescued him when he was jostled and bounced out from the back of a truck, far away from his homeland. One day a dithery ornithologist and Adrien Brody lookalike named Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) shows up at Linda's bookstore, spots Blu, and joyfully IDs him the last surviving male of a very important subspecies; Tulio must whisk Linda and Blu away to Rio at once, where Blue is to be mated with his female counterpart, a persnickety feathered fatale named Jewel (Anne Hathaway).
It's a little disconcerting at first when Blu opens his mouth to speak and Mark Zuckerberg's voice comes out. Would you want to mate with this bird? Jewel, at first, is having none of it, and the fact that Blu can't fly is another deal breaker. But Blu and Jewel's romantic travails are the least of their problems: When they're kidnaped by smugglers, Blu fears he'll never see Linda again.
Then again, you wonder how much he'd miss her if he didn't; the movie is so cluttered with secondary and tertiary characters: There are Blu's two all-singing, all-dancing, all-talking rescuers, Nico and Pedro (Jamie Foxx and Will.I.Am) and an endearing pair of geese named Chloe and Alice (Wanda Sykes and Jane Lynch, neither with enough to do). Let's not forget tough-talking toucan Rafael (George Lopez), and the cute orphan kid from the favela, Fernando (Jake T. Austin), who plays a crucial role in Blu's rescue. There are also lots and lots of thugs for Blu and Jewel to run from -- the credits assign them names as well as handy identifying tags like "Lead Smuggler," "Heavy Smuggler" and "Tall Smuggler," not that you really need to be able to tell them apart.
Linda and Tulio disappear from the story for long stretches, and that's not a bad thing: As the movie began, I feared its major plot thread would involve shy, retiring Linda learning to do daring stuff, like ride a motorbike, and thankfully, that's just one of the picture's sub-sub-threads. Another, of course, concerns shy, shambling Blu's efforts to spread his wings, both literally and figuratively. The director of Rio is Carlos Saldanha, who also made Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Ice Age: The Meltdown and who is, incidentally, from Rio himself. Maybe that helps keep the movie's setting from seeming like a cheap novelty, a way of cashing in on the multi-ethnic market: This may be a cartoon Rio, but it's one with all kinds of life on its streets, and it finds beauty in some of the city's not-so-conventionally pretty areas. And while Rio may be cluttered and manic, Saldanha at least has enough control over it to keep it from becoming a muddy jumble.
If nothing else, Rio is unabashedly jubilant: By the time we get to the big Carnivale finale, where Morgan's bulldog character -- his name is Luiz -- has the opportunity to ride on a float decked out in a fruit-laden Carmen Miranda hat and golden underpants, it's hard to hold much of a grudge against it. By the end, you might think you've had enough happy colors for one day. Then again, there are worse things to overcome than tropical overkill.