There is no market in the movie theater for short animated films today. That market has moved online, only to be discovered in viral form. Such short films are hardly rigid in their aim to “amuse” the way modern animated kids movies are, yet they are experimental, revolutionary and captivating in their own ways. Like those classic shorts, segments of “Rango” exist purely irreverently, in a trippy void of comedy and drama that doesn’t cease to challenge.
Advertisements of the film have reduced the plot to more manageable terms. A chameleon voiced by everyone’s favorite Johnny Depp walks into a desert town, gives himself the pseudonym Rango and fights bad guys who have made the entire town’s water disappear.
What the ads neglect to mention is the opening segment in which Rango gives a brisk monologue of acting tips to the torso of a Barbie doll, a wind-up toy fish and a fake plastic tree. There is no plot here, no simplified explanation, and no context for anything. Quickly the character is thrown from this world of a tiny aquarium into the open freeway with nothing in either direction. He comes across an armadillo that has been essentially severed by a passing car, and still this feels hardly like a rollicking kids movie destined to end in a madcap adventure.
Instead, “Rango” is in the strictest sense a Western… with lizards. The dialogue is rapid and witty, but rarely laugh out loud funny. Classic Western references galore populate “Rango’s” imagery and themes, but they aren’t dragged out and rubbed under our noses the way they would be in a Dreamworks film. It simply presents a mariachi band of owls straight out of “Cat Ballou” and asks we make of that what we will.
In fact there are more than a few fourth-wall breaking scenes that forced me to question what I was watching. Mind trips into Rango’s own version of purgatory are the kind of artistic expressionism that isn’t even seen in Pixar movies.
So what is “Rango?” How do we begin to classify it? Comparisons (for the sake of it I would assume) have been made to “True Grit,” and critics have been quick to point out that Roger Deakins, “True Grit’s” cinematographer, was a visual consultant on “Rango.”
Although Gore Verbinski of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise directs the film, “Rango” feels like the sort of gritty, inventive animated Western the Coens could get away with making. The dialogue has that energy without struggling to be “comedic.” The set pieces and themes are largely in the spirit of a Western, right down to the violence, drinking and smoking. And even the characters themselves are dirty, scaly, rugged, creepy and often furry hodgepodges of unidentifiable animals. They are a wonder to look at, but not for the reasons we would imagine.
Likewise, the frenetic and inconceivable action and chase sequences generously peppered throughout the film have that same air of spontaneity and irreverence the film thrives on. They beg the questions of who could have imagined such a chaotic and odd moment, but then the entire film begs similar questions.
“Rango” is a chameleon of a different color. It’s beautiful mainly because it is so ugly. It’s witty mainly because it is so sparse on ham-handed jokes. It is a great vocal performance film mainly because the high profile cast is so unrecognizable (Isla Fischer, Abigail Breslin, Bill Nighy, Ned Beatty, Timothy Olyphant, Alfred Molina and Ray Winstone make up the supporting ranks).
It is great not because it excels in so many ways but because there simply has not been an animated film like it in at least the last 10 years. If this is the direction future animated films could take, we could have an entirely new genre on our hands.
3 1/2 stars