A way-out Western
By Jake Coyle |
March 20, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IT was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, where "the drugs began to take hold" in the Johnny Depp adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
In the manic, animated "Rango," which stars Depp as a chameleon, our coordinates are similar, and the hallucinogens are well under way. It's as though the drug-conjured lizards of "Fear and Loathing" have been tasked by Hollywood to make a Western.
But "Rango" proceeds from a presumably more sober place: the mind of director Gore Verbinski, who helmed the "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy. It's his first animated film, but if you recall Depp's Jack Sparrow, you'll note that Verbinski is well acquainted with cartoon.
The result is perhaps the most cinematic animated film since Pixar's "Ratatouille." As a slapstick comedy, it doesn't have the emotion resonance of a Pixar film, but it's a visually stunning, endlessly inventive, completely madcap Western, made with obvious love for the genre.
With a wide, flat mouth and two giant bowl-shaped eyes, Rango, clad in a red Hawaiian shirt, doesn't look like your normal animated hero. We quickly learn that he's a precocious young actor whose life cooped up as a pet has habituated his imagination to flights of fancy.
When he finds himself liberated in the Mojave Desert, Rango begins on a journey that ends up with him becoming the sheriff of an old, rickety desert town and having to solve the mystery of its missing water.
Like Wes Anderson's entry to animation, "Fantastic Mr Fox," Verbinski has brought live-action tools to an animated medium. The results in "Rango" are so lively that the post-movie conversation will go some time before any moviegoer remembers that 3-D was (thankfully) omitted.
The movie's postmodernism could be considered too cloying, but it comes off charming, especially because it pulls from such great sources. The Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone are joyfully referenced, complete with a cameo from the Man With No Name. Hans Zimmer's score is a playful ode to those of Ennio Morricone.
Perhaps a new classification has been born: the "SpaghettiOs Western."
In the manic, animated "Rango," which stars Depp as a chameleon, our coordinates are similar, and the hallucinogens are well under way. It's as though the drug-conjured lizards of "Fear and Loathing" have been tasked by Hollywood to make a Western.
But "Rango" proceeds from a presumably more sober place: the mind of director Gore Verbinski, who helmed the "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy. It's his first animated film, but if you recall Depp's Jack Sparrow, you'll note that Verbinski is well acquainted with cartoon.
The result is perhaps the most cinematic animated film since Pixar's "Ratatouille." As a slapstick comedy, it doesn't have the emotion resonance of a Pixar film, but it's a visually stunning, endlessly inventive, completely madcap Western, made with obvious love for the genre.
With a wide, flat mouth and two giant bowl-shaped eyes, Rango, clad in a red Hawaiian shirt, doesn't look like your normal animated hero. We quickly learn that he's a precocious young actor whose life cooped up as a pet has habituated his imagination to flights of fancy.
When he finds himself liberated in the Mojave Desert, Rango begins on a journey that ends up with him becoming the sheriff of an old, rickety desert town and having to solve the mystery of its missing water.
Like Wes Anderson's entry to animation, "Fantastic Mr Fox," Verbinski has brought live-action tools to an animated medium. The results in "Rango" are so lively that the post-movie conversation will go some time before any moviegoer remembers that 3-D was (thankfully) omitted.
The movie's postmodernism could be considered too cloying, but it comes off charming, especially because it pulls from such great sources. The Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone are joyfully referenced, complete with a cameo from the Man With No Name. Hans Zimmer's score is a playful ode to those of Ennio Morricone.
Perhaps a new classification has been born: the "SpaghettiOs Western."
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