Rio

Carlos Saldanha builds the comedy on one physical restriction: Blu cannot fly, and for much of the middle he is chained to Jewel. A bird film withholds flight almost to the end; what you watch is incompetence. The menace is low too, a cockatoo with a stage number rather than the human smugglers. The songs pause the story, and the carnival finale is crowd display, not resolution. The project started as a penguin picture: Saldanha took the idea to Chris Wedge at Blue Sky in 2006 and changed course when rival penguin films appeared. Born and raised in Rio, he says his crew called the carnival scene impossible once he described a few thousand figures with floats and costumes. Sérgio Mendes joined as a music guide and Real in Rio earned an Academy nomination. The species behind Blu is the Spix’s macaw, and the real history is darker than the film: the last wild male vanished in October 2000, the species was judged extinct in the wild in 2019, and birds went back in 2022. A good fit if you accept flight saved for the end and a middle of two chained birds learning to tolerate each other. Not a fit if you open it to learn where the species stands; the optimism and the real calendar do not match.