Rango

Slightly surreal and thoroughly entertaining, Rango took me completely by surprise. When we see animated films coming out these days we tend to more or less know what we're going to get - a Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks film or something in between. Rango is none of these things and so much more... it's an existential comedy-western that pits an unlikely hero against the ruthless march of progress, a search for identity, and a gruesome gallery of wonderfully realised western stock-characters. Some of the film is downright shocking - not because it's neccessarily too adult, but simply because I've become so used to the 'rules' of animated American feature films. I mean, you don't expect to see characters die or joke about the 'active social lives' of their mothers, let alone question their existence or casually get around with an arrow lodged in their eye socket! I don't think Rango is inappropriate for kids, they see and hear much worse in real life or a Transformers movie, but some viewers may find the film's independence completely unexpected.

Rango (Johnny Depp) is a pet chameleon who finds himself stranded in the desert after a car accident. An encounter with a tire-flattened Armadillo (Alfred Molina) leads him to the sun-hardened town of Dirt; a decrepit wild west-like settlement inhabited by animals who covet water (something that is getting increasingly hard for them to procure). Through a combination of tall tale-telling and accidental heroics, Rango is made the town's new sheriff. He enjoys his newfound status as a 'somebody' but his ineptitude unwittingly puts him on the trail of a water-hoarding conspiracy, and soon he's leading a motley posse of crusty townsfolk across the Mojave desert.

First of all, Rango is absolutely and delightfully crazy. Not in a self-consciously 'wacky' way, it's just so hilariously bonkers and audacious that you can't help but love the way it flies off on tangents or breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience. The humour gets very dark at times but it's never an unpleasant or Tim Burton-y experience mainly due to the inspired character design and some enthusiastically nervous vocal work from Depp. The western setting is the film's number 1 star, it allows for a range of animals that don't normally get anthropomorphised in cartoons - burrowing owls, cactus mice, ground squirrels, gila monsters, desert toads, peccaries, etc. I think my favourite character Spoons... some o fthe supporting characters are so fascinatingly horrible to look at that I couldn't take my eyes off them!

Another great thing that the film has going for it is that it's refreshingly free of pop culture references and annoyingly sassy characters designed to appeal to kids. The story itself is a well-crafted homage to a variety of great westerns (see Related Texts) and an introspective character-study, with some amazing set pieces that manage to always be surprising. Rango has all the inventiveness of a quirky animated short film, only it somehow manages to keep this tone inplace consistently from beginning to end. If this film had come out a few months earlier I would've pegged it as a more deserving Best Animated Film Oscar winner than Toy Story 3... and that's not to put Toy Story 3 down, it's just saying how amazing and original Rango is.

DIRECTOR: Gore Verbinski
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by John Logan, with story input from Gore Verbinski and James Byrkit.
KEY ACTORS: Johnny Depp, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Timothy Olyphant, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Bill Nighy, Stephen Root, Ray Winstone, Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Abercrombie

RELATED TEXTS:
- Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp previously teamed up The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.
- A lot of the western mythology (and music) that the film draws on comes directly from Sergio Leone's westerns, namely A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West.
- The character of Rango has been compared to the 'hero' of the Don Knotts comedy-western The Shakiest Gun in the West and the character of Barney Fife (also played by Don Knotts) from The Andy Griffith Show.
- Other influences include Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Three Amigos, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Rio Bravo.