Added to which, the humans we see in Rio 2 range in skin tone from pinkish to, at best, taupe, maybe coffee. And in time-honoured fashion, the cockatoo arch-villain of the piece ( Jemaine Clement) has a British accent. The singing, dancing, comic-relief sidekicks are primarily voiced by African-American actors: Jamie Foxx and will.i.am as a pair of hip-hop fluent "urban" birds, and Tracy Morgan as a slobbering, dim-witted bulldog. Jewel's father is Cuban-born Andy Garcia, her aunt is Puerto Rico-born Rita Moreno, her former beau is mixed-race Hawaiian Bruno Mars (there's singing involved, you see). As for the couple's long-lost jungle relatives, Rio 2 uses non-white voice actors (just as James Cameron did for his blue-skinned indigenous people in Avatar). Justifiable in the case of Blu, who was raised in Minnesota (having been "Americanised", he can't sing or dance like the other Brazilian birds), but more mystifying in the case of Hathaway's Jewel, supposedly born and raised in Rio. For a start, the lead characters are voiced by white Americans. Rio 2 is a colourful, tuneful carnival of multiculturalism, but certain prejudices prevail. This time round, they discover that there is a lost flock of blue macaws in the Amazon rainforest and fly there to meet them. In case you missed the first Rio, the story hinges around the last surviving pair of talking blue macaws: Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg as a sort of avian Woody Allen) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway), an independent-minded Brazilian bird. It is set in an authentic foreign country (director Carlos Saldanha is Brazilian), there's a conservation-minded theme and a mixed cast of white, Latin American and African-American voice actors. In terms of diversity, it's about as good as current animation gets – though that isn't saying much. Maybe we've dropped our guards because talking animals are the lingua franca of innocuous cuteness, but we seem to have got to a point where these movies are teaching children the finer points of racial prejudice before they've even learned to read.
So why are its racial politics stuck in the 1970s? Maybe parents have been too busy dozing at the multiplex, or doing the washing-up while their kids are anaesthetised in front of the TV. It pushes at the technical frontiers of film-making and gives us visual spectacles previously unimaginable, along with substantial, accessible themes. Modern animation is the success story of our movie era. Hollywood is finally starting to reflect the ethnic makeup and sensitivities of its national and global audiences.īut all those dodgy racial politics that have been swept out of live-action movies seem to have quietly found a home. A black director just won the best picture Oscar for another one ( Steve McQueen for 12 Years A Slave), and a Mexican won best director ( Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity). Django Unchained was a hit action movie about slavery. T hese are supposed to be progressive times for movies and people of colour.
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