Nigel (Rio)

"Hello, pretty bird. What's the matter? Cockatoo got your throat?"

- Nigel to Jewel while strangling her

Nigel is the primary antagonist of the Rio franchise.

He is Blu's arch-nemesis, Marcel's former "evil henchbird", and Gabi and Charlie's leader and boss.

Nigel is voiced by Jemaine Clement.

Beginnings
Nigel was once the popular star of many animal TV shows. He was suave, handsome, and ambitious.

However, Nigel was later cruelly kicked out of fame and replaced by a green parakeet called Petricious. Since then, Nigel hatefully despises all exotic birds and he became an evil, bitter, hideous, and mean-spirited bird.

Afterwards, Nigel became the evil henchbird of a group of smugglers led by Marcel and he vowed to smuggle and terrorize exotic birds as revenge for his acting role being ruined.

In Rio
Nigel is first seen as a "patient" at Tulio's aviary. However, his sickness is quickly revealed to be a front; that night, he tricks a guard into picking him up by pretending to be injured, then knocks him out with a chloroform-soaked rag and steals his keys. He then lets Fernando in and he steals Blu and Jewel and brings them to Marcel's hideout. When Jewel tries to escape, Nigel pins her down and starts choking her, taunting her by asking, "What's the matter? Cockatoo got your throat?". However, Marcel orders him to bring her back alive, so the cockatoo returns her to the cage. After Blu and Jewel are locked up, Nigel comes to them and explains the motivation of his evil nature through the song "Pretty Bird," saying that he plans on making them "ugly" as well. He then bids them sweet nightmares and flies off, laughing evilly.

Later, Nigel hears them trying to escape and tries to stop them. Nigel chases Blu and Jewel into the slums of Rio de Janeiro. He nearly recaptures them, but they escape at the last moment, and Nigel collides with an electrical transformer, blacking out the whole city of Rio in the process. After recovering, Nigel heads back to the smugglers' hideout.

Nigel is sent by Marcel to retrieve Blu and Jewel, while Marcel and the other smugglers (Tipa and Armando) plan to use the Carnival show to hide the smuggling of the birds to get to the nearest airport.

Nigel hires a horde of mischievous marmosets to help him catch Blu and Jewel, in doing so, he abuses their leader Mauro and threatens to give them "flying lessons" if they do not find them by the end of the day.

Mauro and his henchmen manage to find Blu and Jewel, but they get into a battle with the Samba Club birds and they fail to capture them. Later, Nigel arrives at the place where the battle had been. He finds a green bird named Tiny, interrorgates her, and terrorizes her into telling the whereabouts of the Blue Macaws. Nigel then abuses Mauro for his failure, then goes after Blu and Jewel himself. He eventually captures Jewel and uses her as bait to lure in Blu and his best friends, the plan works and he locks them all in cages.

After the captives are loaded into the smugglers' plane, the plane takes off. But, Blu later manages to free himself and all the other captive birds, letting them escape out of the plane. However, as Blu tries to get over his fear of flying, Nigel attacks Blu, pins him, and attempts to strangle him. Jewel tries to help Blu, but Nigel throws her aside, causing a cage to fall on Jewel's wing, injuring it. Nigel mocks the macaws, but, an angered Blu manages to hook a fire extinguisher onto the cockatoo's leg and sets it off, sending Nigel flying out of the plane and into one of the propellers, seemingly killing him and eventually causing the plane to crash.

However, some time later, Nigel is revealed to have survived his encounter with Blu, but has lost much of his feathers and is humiliated by a "photo finish" by Mauro as payback for his abuse against him and the other marmosets earlier.

In Rio 2
A few years after the first film, Nigel, who suffered the most undignified of indignities (defeated by what he calls the "pretty birds" and losing his feathers in the process), is back. However, he now flies like a chicken and wears an Elizabethan vest (which hides a large bald patch on his chest) due to his previous accident. Shortly after the plane crash at the end of the first film, he was found by humans, taken into a veterinary surgery and operated on. The head surgeon commented that "he'll live, but he'll never fly again". After that, Nigel began working as a fortune-teller's assistant at a third-rate street fair. Nigel is at the lowest point in his life and he's not happy about it.

When Nigel sees the blue birds that have caused him so much misery, he seeks vengeance. He follows them to the Amazon and is now hungry for payback. Along the way he liberates a big mute anteater called Charlie and a poison dart frog named Gabi from the street-fair. He enlists them as his minions and together they track Blu and Jewel to the Amazon and plan Nigel's revenge.

Nigel's predominant passions are Shakespeare, evil, alliteration, revenge, and attention. For Nigel, revenge is a dish best served cold...and with lots of blue feathers.

Nigel's dreams of show business glory take flight in a particularly telling moment. As he prepares to deal with Blu once and for all, Nigel ends up taking center stage, in disguise, at the auditions overseen by Nico, Pedro and Rafael. Nigel comes up with an act, on the fly, which sparks his inner artist. He goes under the name of Bob the bird to avoid the suspicion of Nico, Pedro and Rafael as they point out that he looked familiar to them.

After winning the audition and discovering that everyone will be at the new show, Nigel uses his new found attention to his advantage and plots to kill Blu with a poisonous dart, using a porcupine quill as a dart, Gabi's venom for poison and Charlie's long snout to fire the dart.

His performance is cancelled as the loggers attack the jungle and a battle ensues between the loggers and the jungle animals. During the battle, Nigel orders Charlie to fire the poisoned dart at Blu, but the dart misses. When Blu removes a strap of lit TNT from a site of designated trees to be demolished, Nigel prevents Big Boss, the head logger, from stopping him, wanting Blu for himself. As Blu flies the TNT upwards into the air, Nigel grabs on and attacks him, revealing himself to Blu just as the TNT blows up. However, both Nigel and Blu survive the explosion and end up tangled in vines, upside-down and unconscious. When they both regain consciousnesses, Nigel attacks Blu and they have a feather fight. Gabi and Charlie try to help Nigel by shooting Blu with another poisoned dart, but it accidentally hits Nigel. Nigel, thinking that he is about to die, gives one last Elizabeth performance, then seemingly dies and and falls off a branch to the ground below. Gabi, thinking that she killed Nigel and unwilling to live in a world without him, drinks a drop of her own poison and presumably dies. However, it is revealed that Gabi is not poisonous at all, but was convinced that she was as a child. Nigel, still alive, tries to attack Blu and Jewel one last time, but Gabi drags Nigel away and showers him love.

Nigel and Gabi are later captured by Tulio, and taken back to Rio to be observed.

Personality
Nigel is intelligent, cruel, greedy, malevolent, cunning, and vengeful. He exhibited highly anti-social behavior.

He is very violent, constantly seen using physical force to injure or terrorize other characters. For instance, Nigel threatened to give Mauro and his subordinates "flying lessons" in order to coerce the monkeys into helping him find Blu and Jewel. After the battle in the samba club, Nigel arrived at the scene and terrorized another bird into telling him where the blue macaws went by threatening to "pop" or "crack" her head.

He is also extremely sadistic, often taking great joy and pleasure in others' suffering. For example, he was shown in the smugglers' lair to terrorize the captured birds, and he later ridiculed Jewel when her wing was injured. In both situations, he laughed maniacally in response to seeing his victims' fear and injury.

He is also rather ruthless, he shows no pity or mercy to his victims and enemies. He also holds no remorse for his evil deeds.

Appearance
Nigel is a large Sulphur-crested cockatoo. He has greyish-white plumage, a black beak and yellow crest feathers. He also has pale red bags under his eyes.

In Rio 2, Nigel wears a bird-sized vest of Elizabethan design. He now has a large bald spot on his chest, which is covered up by the vest.

Trivia

 * Nigel is sometimes thought to be the secondary antagonist of the first film due to him being Marcel's henchbird.
 * His true first name is Cocks. It should be noted that "Cock" means a rooster or male chicken and has nothing to do with a cockatoo.
 * Although a sulfur-crested cockatoos' diet consists almost entirely of insects or plants, Nigel was seen eating a chicken leg in the first film. It is mistakenly said by Tipa to be cannibalism. This is a mistake because Nigel is a cockatoo and chicken is from a chicken, not of the same species.
 * When he was a telenovela star, he starred in TV shows titled Fly Hard, All My Flock, and As the Cage Turns and participated in the Carnival parade. It was also mentioned that he was once popular all across South America.
 * The extended version of the song "Pretty Bird" mentions that when Nigel was pushed out of fame, he was replaced by a parakeet from Paraguay named Petricious. This may be the reason he was drawn to criminal activities. However, the reason just being that "they got a pretty parakeet to fill his shoes" was in both that version and the shortened version that actually was in the first film.
 * He is the only bird to be plucked of nearly all his feathers.
 * Like Blu, Nigel was a pet. Despite this, he was trained to do a certain task (smuggling birds) and Blu wasn't.
 * Surprisingly enough, he is somehow damaged by the Mighty Eagle's earthquake in Angry Birds Rio, which is unusual, being that he is never even close to the ground in levels when fought against.
 * Nigel is, without a dought, one of the most evil Blue Sky Studios villains ever.
 * Nigel was the one who pretended to be sick just to fool his enemies.
 * He was noticeably stronger than most other birds in terms of physical strength, considering both his size and sharp talons.
 * Nigel likes to torture birds and bring nightmares into their minds.
 * Nigel is a bit similar to Steele: Both are greedy and jealous, both lost their fame, both want revenge, both are still alive after getting beat by a hero, and both had a team.