Abstract

This article analyzes Rio de Janeiro’s bravura reinvention as an aspiring global city by examining Carlos Saldanha’s 2011 “Rio,” conceived during the city’s, and Brazil’s, economic euphoria, and when animations were benefiting from major technological advances in production and distribution. The blockbuster shares redeployments of Rio’s negative image with other media campaigns in the run-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Its seemingly simplistic plot represents global issues and references the urban imagery developed by the US Good Neighbor Policy’s mass tourism and media initiatives (1930s–1940s), particularly Disney’s animations and Freeland’s “Flying Down to Rio.” Saldanha’s ambivalent affective geography may foster tourism, but also reinstates the policy’s North-South asymmetries against the grain of landmark challenges of power hierarchies by emerging BRICS countries and the G20. The movie’s infelicities amidst the inherently laudable inclusion of a social plot, correlating with Global South urban geopolitics, are assessed.