I bought the film Rio for my two-year old daughter for Chanukah. Well, actually I bought it for myself, using her as the excuse. Having watched it about half a dozen times since then, I can conclude that, like the Madagascar movies, it is yet another animated film exploring the Jewish condition through an anthropomorphized creature, in this case a Blue Macaw called Blu.
Blu is captured as a young bird, before he learns to fly, and is transported from his native habitat of the Brazilian jungle to Minnesota. However, as the last Blue Macaw of his species, his owner is persuaded to return Blu to Brazil so he can mate with the last remaining female and thus ensure their continuation. Unfortunately, Blu is captured so he can be sold to collectors of rare and exotic birds. The rest of the movie follows Blu’s adventure: will he be reunited with his owner, will he and Jewel fall in love to ensure the survival of his species?
How do we know that Blu is Jewish? Well, first he is voiced by Jewish actor Jesse Einsenberg. Second, he is blue, suggesting the twin stripes of the Israeli flag and its national team’s football strip. Third, the object of his attraction is called Jewel. But there are deeper and more significant clues to his underlying Jewishness.
Blu is an exile, forcibly removed from his home and raised in a foreign country. He embodies the outsider, the stranger in a strange land. However, Blu does not know this, as he is thoroughly domesticated. His essential bird nature, or id, has been completely suppressed, manifested by his inability to fly and dance. These deficiencies highlight his non-athletic nature, a very stereotypical Jewish tic. As the film progresses, we learn that he yearns for captivity over freedom and prefers domesticity to the wild. For example, his idea of the good life is to sit indoors and enjoy a hot chocolate with marshmallows.
Furthermore, Blu has become urbanized, adopting the mores of civilization (although not civility for he burps loudly when brushing his teeth — another indicator of his Jewish Otherness). As a small-town slicker, Blu is an excellent mimic (a clear sign of the Jewish condition), being able to copy a clock-radio and car alarm, among other things. He lives indoors at his owner’s house and goes with her to her place of work which is, of course, a bookshop. He is described by a Canada Goose (voiced by Wanda Sykes, thus recalling the uber-Jewish Curb Your Enthusiasm), as a “nerd bird”. He can also read books, which he does in order to learn how to fly. Indeed, Blue Macaws are described as very intelligent birds. Thus Blu is defined by his brains rather than his physical attributes, what we can call his Yiddische Kopf or “Jewish brains”.
When Blu is, against his will, returned to the wild he manifests the anti-nature attitudes which are also characteristically and stereotypically Jewish. In dialogue reminiscent of Madagascar, Blu states his fear of the jungle:
Jewel: Now, uh… just come on! We need to find a safe place to spend the night.
Blu: Safe? Safe? We are in the jungle! You know when people say ‘it’s a jungle out there’, well I’m pretty sure they don’t mean it as a good thing.
Jewel: Look, I hate to break it to you, but this is where our kind naturally lives.
Blu: Hey, hey! Don’t talk to me about nature. I watch Animal Planet. I know all about the food chain.
As he speaks, a bug flying by gets eaten by a frog sticking his tongue out to grab it which, in turn, is swallowed by a snake. This exactly replicates a similar jungle/food chain sequence in Madagascar. Both draw upon Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975) in which he articulates his view of nature: “Nature is spiders, and bugs and big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating… it’s like an enormous restaurant.”
Blu exclaims, “Ah! You see? You see, out here, I’m just an hors d’oeuvre! Nothing more than a feathery spring roll.” Of course, his use of a metaphor drawn from the world of Chinese cuisine yet again points to the Jewish penchant for such food, particularly on Christmas, and which is a significant feature of Woody Allen’s oeuvre. When Jewel tries to reassure him that it is “why we stay in the trees and not on the ground”, Blu opines that he would “feel much more comfortable in something man-made” such as a tree house.
To also show how far Blu is removed from his inner id, when he is taken to a Rio night club, he complains about “all the obvious health code violations”.
Finally, the movie’s concern with survival and continuity echo contemporary Jewish concerns particularly in the wake of the Holocaust and modern assimilation when intermarriage is increasing. The whole point of the film is to ensure endogamous reproduction hence its repeated use of the word “kind” to refer to Blu’s species (“his kind”, “our kind”, “own kind”).
So, taken together, although nowhere explicit, these clues point to the Jewishness of Blu, the Blue Macaw whose bird id has been suppressed in favor of an urbanized superego that is essentially Jewish. It takes his involuntary return to the wild to release his inner id. I look forward to seeing how this is developed in the sequel, Rio 2.
Meanwhile, my daughter loves the film and has not yet detected any of this underlying, subsurface Jewishness of the plot but, in time, I’m sure she will.
Nathan Abrams 