Rhapsody in blue

Why did you decide to set the film in the Amazon?

Carlos Sal-danha (CS): I didn’t want to repeat myself. That is why I decided to go for a place that’s very far from Rio – and in a way, very foreign, even to Brazilians. Amazingly enough, the Amazon is not well known by our own people, so it’s a mystery for Brazilians as much as it is for everyone else. I was born in Brazil; I go back all the time, but I had never been to the Amazon until I decided to make a movie about it. I went there and I was amazed by how different it was from my perception.

What is the starting point of Rio 2?

The story is a continuation of the first one, but it’s been expanded. Now Blu and Jewel have a family and they have to decide, based on their individual personalities, the best way to deal with the kids. Blu is more domesticated; Jewel is more wild. When they find there are more of their species out in the Amazon they have a family meeting and decide to go on a journey to find out if there really are more birds like them. It is a family trip. When they get there, to their surprise they discover there are other birds of their kind – who happen to be family. It is her family though, not his, and that creates the conflict between the two of them.

BACK TO BRAZIL. Director Carlos Saldanha takes viewers back to his home country in ‘Rio 2’.
Picture: AFP.

Why did you decide to make a sequel?

I have done a lot of sequels, going all the way back to Ice Age. When I did the first one a decade ago we had no idea we would do a second one. The movie ended up being a huge success and we had to say to ourselves: “People want more, so let’s tell another story.” We had to really work hard on that sequel and it took a long time to get there, because we were caught off guard. After that, we learned our lesson. We understood that if the audience likes the story and characters and wants to see more, you have to think early on about how to continue the story.

Not that you plan a sequel. Rio was a success of course: everybody liked it and once it came out we took a break. But I was already starting to think about a second film, although nothing was set in stone until they said: “Let’s find a way to do a sequel.” But by that time it wasn’t a surprise and just came naturally. We knew there were kids in the new story and we continued to think about their adventure and the future of the birds and what we could do with them.

Was it challenging animating the Amazon?

It was challenging because the Amazon is vast. I studied different clusters and combined them into our fictitious Amazon. I created my own version. If you’ve been there you will recognise the colour of the water, the animals and some of the trees. We got a cluster of maybe five or six different trees from the Amazon and tried to build them. So we created a forest.

Is there an environmental theme in the story?

There is a warning about the environment. The Amazon, like a lot of ecosystems around the world, is suffering – so the story is about protecting the home of the birds. The overall concern is now they have found more birds, how do we protect them?

Linda (Leslie Mann) and Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) were the ones protecting the birds in Rio. They continue to protect the birds, but on a bigger scale.

The main story centres on the birds and how they interact with the new family – but there are the external perils as well.