Nigel (Rio)



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

- Nigel ''

Nigel is an evil and sadistic cockatoo and the main antagonist of the Rio franchise, in the first movie alongside Marcel and in the second alongside the Boss Logger. He's not a pretty bird, but used to be quite a looker.

Once a popular television star, he was replaced by a young parakeet from Paraguay named Petricious.

Since then, he has had it out for all birds of beauty. Nigel put his jealousy and rage to use in his role as "evil henchbird" to Marcel and the smugglers.

He is Blu's arch-nemesis and Charlie and Gabi's boss.

Rio (2011)
He first appears at an animal caring center, in which he acts like he is sick, so 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.

Rio 2
Nigel, who suffered the most undignified of indignities at the end of Rio (defeated by what he calls “the pretty birds” and losing his feathers in the process ), is back.

Now he flies like a chicken and wears an Elizabethan vest, he works as 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 now he’s 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 plot Nigel's revenge. For Nigel, revenge is a dish best served cold and with lots of blue feathers.

Nigel’s predominant passions are Shakespeare, evil, alliteration, revenge and attention. He is still evil, but Nigel really wants to return to acting. But that does not affect his focus on evil-doing.

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.

He uses his new found attention to his advantage as he wins the audition and plots to kill Blu with a poisonous dart using Gabi's 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, he attacks Blu when he is flying with a strap of lighted TNT away from a site of designated trees to be demolished revealing himself to Blu just as the TNT blows up.

Nigel and Blu are tangled in vines, upside-down and unconscious when they both regain conciusnessss they have a feather fight and Gabi accidentally shoots Nigel with a poison dart.

Nigel, thinking that he is about to die gives one last Elizabeth performance and falls off a branch to his presumed death while 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.

It is revealed that Gabi wasn't poisonous at all, but was convinced that she was as a child smother Nigel with her love and Nigel and her are taken back to Rio to be observed.

Nigel’s sidekick is a villainous but emotional frog named Gabi who is deeply in love with Nigel.

The tragedy of their love is that they can’t canoodle because Gabi is highly toxic. Nigel also now has a mute anteater henchman called Charlie who is very loyal to him.

Personality
As the main antagonist of the first and second films, Nigel exhibited highly anti-social behavior.

He is very violent, constantly seen using physical force to injure or terrorize other characters. For instance, he 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 poachers' 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.

He is also intelligent, vengeful, cunning, cruel, malevolent and greedy.

Trivia

 * Nigel is voiced by Jemaine Clement.
 * Nigel is the main antagonist in the first film and the second film.


 * Nigel was thought to be the secondary antagonist of Rio.


 * His full name is Cocks "Nigel" Cockatoo. 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 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 called "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 movie.


 * He's the only bird to be plucked of nearly all his feathers.


 * Like Blu, he was a pet. Although Nigel was a pet like Blu, 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 you fight him...


 * Nigel is one of the few Blue Sky Studios villains to be sadistic and mean.


 * Nigel was the one who pretended to be sick just to fool his enemies.


 * Nigel was noticeably stronger than most other bird characters in terms of physical strength, considering both size and sharp talons.


 * Nigel likes to torture birds and bring nightmares into their minds.


 * Nigel was the only villain to have his own song.


 * He returns in Rio 2, but he will have a team.


 * Nigel had a team in the first one, and now in Rio 2.


 * A tree frog named Gabi, will be in love with Nigel in Rio 2.


 * For Rio, in the McDonalds Happy Meals toy, there was a toy of him with keys in one of his wings.


 * Promotional images for Rio 2 depict Nigel wearing some form of bird-sized garment, possibly to hide some of his missing feathers around his neck.


 * In one of the newest pictures for Rio 2, shows Nigel with not just Gabi and Charlie, but also with three monkeys and three scarlet macaws (one of which is Felipe the leader of the aggressive scarlet macaw tribe which lives in the Amazon) suggesting that he will have more minions then thought. You can see this picture in his gallery.


 * Recent trailers for Rio 2, shows Nigel wearing a mask (made of leaves), and performing a routine of some kind, suggesting that he will infiltrate Nico and Pedro's talent show auditions.


 * Nigel is almost similar to Steele: both are jealous, both lost their fame, both get revenge, both are still alive after getting beat by a hero and both had a team.