Blue Sky Studios, the animation outfit that gave us the Ice Age series, is in warmer territory with Rio 2, a buoyant 3D CGI movie that juggles multiple plot lines, makes the most of the vivid colours and images that a rainforest location has to offer, and delivers a good-natured adventure comedy with a well-chosen musical base.

Director and co-writer Carlos Saldanha focuses on the two central characters from the first movie, a pair of rare Spix’s blue macaws. Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway) are now raising a family in Rio de Janeiro.

But Jewel is hankering to take her family to the rainforest. Blu, born in Brazil but raised in Minnesota, is definitely a city boy, taking a GPS and breath mints to the Amazon. And when they meet up with other macaws in the wild, he almost withers under the scorn of Jewel’s long-lost father (Andy Garcia) who’s a feathered version of Robert De Niro in Meet The Fockers.

There are a few other plot strands and devices to juggle, some new, some old. The villainous cockatoo Nigel (Jemaine Clement) returns from the first movie, still flightless and furious, but he’s determined to take his revenge on Blu.

The histrionic Nigel now has a companion in malevolence, a diminutive Schiaparelli-pink poisonous frog called Gabi (Kristin Chenoweth). She expresses her obsessive devotion in a vocally agile comic number called Poisonous Love that’s one of the movie’s highlights.

In other developments, evil loggers determined to bulldoze and destroy the macaw habitat meet with determined opposition from Blu’s human friends, Linda (Leslie Mann) and Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro). Blu has a love rival, the debonair Roberto (Bruno Mars). There are World Cup references, most notably in a soccer-style high-stakes ace-off between two rival bird teams.

Blu’s avian buddies from the first movie (Jamie Foxx and will.i.am) are along from the ride. It’s a crowded schedule and some elements fare better than others.

The film is at its most entertaining in the musical sequences, among them a giddy Busby Berkeley style extravaganza in the rainforest and a smart comic montage of audition from jungle creatures aspiring to perform at Carnival time. And Nigel, with a little help from Gabi, makes Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive unquestionably his own.