Most animated films are made for kids but contain just enough smarts to entertain adults. Rango is made for adults and contains just enough fun to entertain kids. Rango, which just may be the most beautiful and certainly among the strangest films you will see all year, is Disney by way of Hunter S. Thompson. It is Chinatown recast with a lizard. It is Blazing Saddles with existential angst. It is John Ford’s vistas and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns spoofed, but romantically so. Rango is, quite simply, both weird and wonderful.

Rango the chameleon (voiced by Johnny Depp) lives a sheltered life. He is a domesticated pet who spends every moment of his life in a small glass terrarium pretending he is a great actor on a grand stage. He pictures himself going on to fame and fortune, but how great can one be if one is, for all intents and purposes, locked in a cell? But when an accident lands Rango smack dab in the sun-baked, lawless, nearly ghost town of Dirt, somewhere in the middle of the Mojave desert, the lily-livered Rango must play the most important role of his life—gun-slinging sheriff. Rango is hardly a conventional hero, a lizard stocked with chutzpa but little common sense, who, when his lies begin to find him out, tells even crazier ones to extricate himself. However, when his posturing finally catches up with him, he is not allowed to skulk away. “No man,” he is told in one of the year’s most delightful cameos, “can walk out on his own story.”

Watching Rango is like rummaging through a medieval curiosities cabinet. If Fellini, with his penchant for casting grotesque faces, ever made a cartoon with tiny animals, it would look like this. There’s a whole host of crazy critters including the feisty, obstinate iguana Beans (Isla Fisher), the young cactus mouse Priscilla (Abigail Breslin), a road-kill armadillo (Alfred Molina), a talkative turtle (Ned Beatty), a Gila monster (Ray Winstone), a rattlesnake with a gun barrel where his rattle should be (Bill Nighy), and a chorus (both in the musical and Greek sense of the word) of mariachi band owls who keep predicting Rango’s heroic death. Other phenomenal voice actors include Harry Dean Stanton, Timothy Olyphant, Claudia Black and Stephen Root. And, of course, there is the marvelous Depp, a chameleon actor himself if ever there was one.

Director Gore Verbinski, who made the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, uses Rango, his first animated film, as a way to escape the surly bonds of live-action and catapult himself into a world where his imagination is the only limitation. Whatever else Rango is, it is a visual masterpiece. This is the first animated film from Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the world’s best and most accomplished special effects house. One wonders what took them so long to produce their own animated film, but not—given the extraordinary talent behind it—how it looks so jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The desert has never looked more majestic and utterly photorealistic. Several scenes of the sun setting over the dust-strewn expanse are enough to take your breath away. That the preeminent cinematographer Roger Deakins was consulted on the visuals is clear in every luminous frame. Rango also broke with industry convention and rather than place its actors in isolation booths to record their lines, gathered them together in a single sound studio where they performed the various scenes as if they were on a stage. If you were a betting person, bet on Rango to beat 2011’s Pixar offering, Cars 2.

Rango is a familiar story that goes familiar places but does so in such clever and sentient ways that one cannot help but marvel. At no time is the film cynical, insincere or bows to pop culture references. This is not, thank god for it, Shrek with a six-shooter. Rango is much more invested in metaphor for that. This is not a kid’s movie—not because it’s offensive, but because it’s incompressible. Kids will be too enamored with the silly characters and shoot’em-ups to realize just how clever Rango truly is. Verbinski and screenwriter John Logan have packed their tongue-in-cheek narrative full of the iconography of the West and of movie references, allusions and homages only film buffs will likely spot. What makes the film so much fun is its marvelously self aware quality. It knows it is a movie and plays to that fact repeatedly. The loopy dialogue and verbal sparring that constitutes the script is at no time not weird. Rango is damn peculiar and proud of it.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Gore Verbinski
Starring: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ray Winstone, Timothy Olyphant, Ned Beatty, Claudia Black, Stephen Root, Ryan Hurst, Alanna Ubach, Beth Grant, Kym Whitley, Lew Temple, Patrika Darbo
Rated PG for rude humor and language.
Running Time: 107 minutes