Rating: 4 out of a possible 5
When I first saw the teaser for this bizarre and fun film, I was interested.
The protagonist is a little green lizard in a hawaiian shirt, and he becomes a sherrif in a strange little town called Dirt filled with straange little animals. No other animated film for kids has ever been this detailed, this imaginative, this incredibly grotesque and surreal in a while. Every character is crazy-looking in their own special way: one bird has an arrow going through one eye and out the side of his head.
The reason for this is that this is the first full film to be made by ILM, George Lucas' special effects company that has been giving us CGI delights for decades. And this is quite a premiere for them. The ballad of Rango, as he goes from being a lonely pet lizard to the hero of a frontier town, is both filled with witty and highly-memorable characters and brings us to a strange alien world that is a combo of Pixar, spaghetti westerns, and drug-induced hallucinations.
Rango connects to me because people say the funny lookin' visage of our scaly hero is almost identical to mine. For some reason, I don't think of that as insulting: to be compared to this funny little dude is a compliment. This film is about finding your identity, and a creature as quirky as Rango is as close as some are going to get to understanding me. This is probably the case for lots of other weird little kids who have connected with this good film, and weird little kids in general: as I was sitting in the dark theatre, watching Rango, dressed in poncho and hat, slowly making his way towards the downright-scary Rattlesnake Jack, I realized that this is the way that all those kids felt. All those kids who sat glued to their seats, watching Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name prepare to blast away some more Mexican muchachos. The Western and the Animated film both transcend generations, and Rango has brought that tradition somewhere bold and fasciniting.
