Nigel (Rio)

"Hello, pretty bird."

- Nigel

Nigel is the primary antagonist of the movie Rio. He is a psychopathic Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, who serves as the pet of the poachers who kidnap two rare blue macaws, Blu and Jewel.

He is voiced by Jemaine Clement.

History
He first appears at an animal caring center, in which he acts like he is sick, now the smugglers can enter and steal Blu and Jewel for a fortune. He explained the motivation of his true nature with the song "Pretty Bird": He was the star of a popular animal show until he was replaced by a green parakeet from Paraguay called "Petricious" (the name and origin being revealed in the part of the song that wasn't used in the movie), hence he developed a hatred against exotic birds, and he planned to help smugglers send them to extinction for vastly amounts of fortune.

He chased Blu and Jewel through Rio as they escape, but he failed to catch up to them. It was then that his owner, Marcel (the leader of the smugglers) gives him the task to find the macaws and bring them back, as he and the other smugglers (Armando and Tipa) plan to use the Carnival festival to cover the smuggling of the birds to get to the closest airport. Nigel then hires a group of marmosets to help him catch Blu and Jewel, threatening and abusing their leader Mauro to do so. Though the marmosets manage to find Blu and Jewel, they failed to catch them, and upon learning this, Nigel abuses them more, deciding to take matters into his own hands.

He eventually manages to kidnap Jewel and uses her to attract Blu and his other friends into being trapped into cages during the Carnival festival. Upon being given two of Blu and Jewel's feathers by Nigel to prove of his success, Marcel and his smuggling gang head onward to the airport, loading all the captured birds into their plane before taking off. During the final battle in the smugglers' plane, after Blu frees himself and all the captured birds and letting them escape back to their habitats, he engages into a battle with Nigel.

Jewel tries to intervene, but Nigel throws her into the wall, causing a cage to fall on Jewel's wing, damaging it. This infuriates Blu and he manages to defeat Nigel by setting his leg on a fire extinguisher, sending him flying out of plane and into one of the propellers, causing the plane to descend. This gave a chance for Blu to escape with Jewel, as he finally learns how to fly. This also forced Marcel and his gang to escape via parachute, though they would later end up being arrested. At the end, while the smugglers are thrown away in jail, Nigel survives from his encounter with Blu, but has lost much of his feathers and is humiliated by Mauro as payback for his abuse against him and the marmosets earlier. Though Nigel survived in the film, he is most likely to die in his current condition, maybe due to starvation, thirst, or being hunted by a predator.