Blu, the bird who wouldn't fly

When we first took my niece Keona swim-ming in a pool, she was two years old. My mother and I had borrowed her for four days from her mother, and we had brought her to Bohol. We were at the Bohol Beach Club. We put Keona in a duck-shaped salbabida and dragged it to where she couldn’t reach the bottom of the pool anymore. “My feet! My feet!” she started screaming, “I can’t feel my feet.” Seeing her tears, we brought her back to the pool steps, where she was content to sit and slap the water. I knew then and there that my niece was a bit like me and my mother: Cerebral. I knew she would rarely dive into doing something without getting it right—whatever right meant for her—in her head first.

When I took a personal leadership development seminar, I learned that being mental wasn’t necessarily bad, but could also stand in the way of my meeting my goals. My feelings are my true compass, and I can find my true north by navigating by feelings. When I’m following my heart, the last thing I want to do is to overthink. “Don’t be too mental,” I was told by coaches often, “Get down to the heart level.”

I could hear myself uttering the same things as I watched Rio with Keona. Sometimes I was talking to Blu, the blue macaw, and sometimes I was talking to myself. Oh, was I feeling Blu the entire time!

Rio tells the story of a domesticated Spix’s macaw named Blu, who finds his way as a chick to Minnesota by way of illegal smugglers. Some background information about the species: They are, indeed, believed to be extinct in the wild. What Spix’s macaws we have in the world were all bred in captivity. A Wikipedia entry says there are 85 of these macaws known to be alive.

In the movie Rio, Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg from Social Network) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway) are the last of their kind. Blu is living in a bookstore with Linda (Leslie Mann), the girl who picked him off the street. He remembers no other life except for the one he has with Linda, and it’s a pretty comfortable one.

One day, a Brazilian scientist named Tulio (Brazilian hottie Rodrigo Santoro) arrives at the bookstore. He has tracked them down, he says, because Blu is the last male of his species and he has the last female. For their species to survive, Blu and Jewel have to mate. This means that Linda and Blu have to go to Brazil with Tulio, leaving their comfort zone. Rio de Janeiro isn’t at all like the home Blu had come to know and love, but in it he feels stirrings in his heart. And then there’s Jewel, who’s wild and beautiful and despised being tethered, and makes him want to fly.

In this film, the idea of flight is the main metaphor for freedom—from smugglers; from the threat of extinction; from fear of change, attachment, and love. Because he is domesticated, you could say that Blu had learned to love his prison. He was removed from his nest as a bird, so he had never learned the joy of flying—which doesn’t mean he doesn’t know any form of joy at all (there’s a scene involving hot chocolate that shows otherwise). But then, Blu is a bird. What is flight but his innermost nature?

Two scenes stand out when I think of Blu and his attempts at flight. In one scene, he is in Minnesota. Some wild birds had just taunted him for being flightless, and so he picks up several books on aerodynamics, does his research, and attempts to apply the principles he learns. “This is it!” he shouts—he flies a little, but fails a lot. In the other scene, there is simply no time to think. Jewel is falling to the ocean with a broken wing, and Blu’s heart simply gave him flight. Yes, he merely followed his heart.

Navigate by the heart, I say. Navigate by the heart.

More movies like Rio for Keona and me, please.

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