Someday My Prince Will Come

Wilmington on Movies. Pick of the Week: New. Rio

Rio is a big, coruscatingly colorful feature-cartoon love-letter to Rio de Janeiro from Brazilian director/writer Carlos Saldanha (director and co-director on the Ice Age movies) — and it’s full of spectacular computer-cartoon images of Saldanha’s legendar city of samba, aswarm with funny animals acting wild and crazy in Carnival time.

Saldanha’s movie, a gorgeous and obviously heartfelt tribute to his city, whirls and pulses and dances and pops with energy. At its most exciting and colorful, it soars through the skies ’round the Christ the Redeemer statue on Corcovado Mountain, and over Rio beaches of golden sand teeming with bikini-clad Brazilian dolls, the guys eyeing them, and suntan oil, and waving hips and multicolored beach umbrellas, all backed by hills rising to a sky filled with shacks and poor people (they dance too), rimmed by an ocean clear and blue as a piece of fallen sky (as Ross MacDonald would say).

In the movie, when we’re not swooping though the skies on hang-gliders or on bird wing, we’re dropping down below to the streets of the city: those hot, seething, spacious or half-mean streets swallowed in the frenzy of Carnival in one of the world‘s favorite playgrounds: the city of Black Orpheus , the city of That Man in Rio , the city of Pixote and of City of God , here recreated visually at its torrid, rhythmic Carnival Bossa Nova/big beat best.

As for the funny animals, Rio has ‘em up the hip-shaking wazoo, including those ultimate funny animals called humans (sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes compassionate, sometimes greedy and sometimes money-mad and vicious). The good humans here include Linda the bookseller from Moose Lake, Minnesota ( Leslie Mann ), and Tulio the animal scientist from Rio ( Rodrigo Santorio ).

More than that, we’ve got an evil Australian cockatoo named Nigel ( Jemaine Clement ). We’ve got bad-ass black market marmosets. We’ve got a Big Daddy Toucan named Rafael voiced by George Lopez , a sensitive but slobbering bulldog named Luiz ( Tracy Morgan ), two frisky little birds, canary and cardinal, named Nico and Pedro ( Jamie Foxx and will i.