ANI-MOVIES, *Rio 2

Aside from Ice Age, the only other Blue Sky Studios film to receive a sequel was Rio. Rio 2 came out three years after the original, which was met with box office success, although the makers tried to pack too much into a single suitcase with numerous plots baked up for one a single film since they weren't sure there was enough gas in the tank to warrant this franchise being a trilogy, at least at the time. Carlos Saldanha returns to direct this installment which was dedicated to writer Don Rhymer who wrote the script for both Rio films and passed away before the sequel was released. The entire cast of celebrities from the original are back along with some new additions including Miguel Ferrer in his penultimate performance before he departed. Whereas the first film had a streamlined objective, Rio 2 suffers from an overload of plots that called for the film to be even longer than the original.

Happening the exact same amount of time in real life later from the first film, Blu and Jewel now have a trio of children and live in the Rio bird sanctuary. Blu's owner Linda along with her new husband Tulio believe they've discovered a hidden colony of the blue parrots that Blu and Jewel were thought to be the last of. Blu finds out about this and flies with his entire family along with a few of their other friends from Rio, and of course eventually locate an entire flock of blue parrots. Turns out this is where Jewel originally came from, and her father Eduardo is the head bird. Blu begins to become jealous of Jewel's old childhood friend Roberto, but tries to adjust to the wildlife of birds in the jungle. Meanwhile, Linda and Tulio come across a gang of illegal foresters who are striping the Amazon of its trees. To add even more onto the plot, the bad bird Nigel finds out about Blu's trip although the former smuggler can no longer fly after getting run through a plane engine, but gets help from his lovesick poison frog ally Gabi and a silent anteater who gets roped into Nigel's plan of revenge. Blu fails to help impress his new father-in-law, especially after losing a parrot socker game to the neighboring red parrots. Things pick up though when Blu frees Linda and Tulio from the crooked loggers and leads the other jungle animals in a strike against them which saves their home. Nigel finally gets to have a small tussle with Blu but is ultimately defeated and set back to Rio along with Gabi who turns out to be not poisonous. Blu and his family decide to stay in the jungle with the other blue parrots.

Rio 2 has a contradictory title for a sequel as like the Madagascar sequels, it doesn't all happen in the place it's named after as most of it is deep in the Amazon. There was just an overlord of story ideas that some of the characters get completely removed from the film for long periods of time, including Blu's kids who you think would get more screentime. Way more scenes were given to Nigel who keeps plotting vengeance with at least two musical scenes to himself, and one for Gabi voiced sung by Kristin Chenoweth, and dedicating all this for characters who barely interact with the main story is merely filler which what killed the momentum of other animated sequels like Frozen 2. The first Rio had a satisfying singular objective, but Rio 2 stumbles around trying to find which direction to go to.