To begin, you can tell a movie has class when it starts out quoting Shakespeare. I'm not a literary snob but let's be fair, he was an amazing playwright who was able to create stories that appealed both to the common man and the queen of England. Interestingly this is also a good parallel for this movie. It features good storytelling, the pace is quick and never leaves the audience bored, the characters are genuinely interesting, and the dialogue is snappy and humorous. All this makes for a good movie that most people can appreciate. For those of us looking for a bit more in our movies this film is start to finish full of foreshadowing and movie references. As I was watching I could barely contain my excitement as I heard the theme from Django in the main theme for Rango, or when Hunter S. Thompson, as depicted by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, makes a cameo appearance (Johnny Depp also voices Rango the hero of the film). These are some of the more notable references to well known movies. You can also add to the list A Fist Full of Dollars, Cat Ballou, Chinatown, and The Road Warrior. I'd like to remind you that this is a kids movie with a PG rating and 3 of the 5 movies mentioned are rated R and the other 2 feature smoking, drinking, betrayal, murder, and downright cold blooded villainy; all things you wouldn't find in a kids movie but are in Rango. In fact the only kids movie I noticed it referencing was Fival Goes West which...cough*...is another kids movie that rocks and has the drinking, smoking, gamboling, murder, genocide, etc...
For all its successes it has precious few failings. There are minor inconsistencies in the style of movie they are going for. Covered wagon chases are fair game in a western but being chased by an army of bat riding prairie dogs is pushing it. Through the whole movie I noticed only a couple jokes that were out of place, mainly the prostate jokes, two of which were in rapid succession. I don't know what kind of deal was made to keep that in but it must have been a doozy! The only thing I can imagine is that they were going for a very immature middle school audience with a couple of these jokes, crude bathroom humor that's just embarrassing in a movie this good. I walked out of the theater thinking that this deserved the academy award for best animated movie of 2011 and it may happen, but a couple of jokes like that could easily lose them that kind of recognition. Especially when they have jokes about thespians (watch the movie, you wouldn't believe hillbillies could make a joke that funny). Another thing that I loved about this movie was its pseudo-cult-like-religion. I'm no stranger to Hollywood's aversion to putting any kind of Judeo-Christian imagery in a movie outside of a negative stereotype, but this movie's insistence of having an almost Christian religion with the word "God" replaced with "The Great Spirit of the West" every single time. For a movie this clever I was praying to the Great Spirit of the West through the whole thing that there was a reason for such a bizarre word choice and wouldn't you know it, they actually did that for a reason other than to be PC. Well done Rango, you made a tasteful joke involving a religious context.
Visually this movie beats everything you've ever seen. Pixar has been the computer animated giant for years with DreamWorks lagging behind as a good but not as good animation studio. Here, out of nowhere Nickelodeon, who has been wallowing in failure for years (most recently at the horrific failure of The Last Airbender), pulled together Rango with the help of Industrial Light and Magic to outdo any CG movie to date.
Imagine the rock crab scene from Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Remember how you went ooh and aah at the pretty visuals? Well imagine that for 107 minutes. Ever since I saw the disaster area that was 9 (that's the movie 9) every time I watch an animated movie I look for where they cut corners or didn't animate something just right. ILM does not make mistakes. Every shot of this movie is beautiful and the processing power needed to animate this movie must have been staggering. From the fur and feather to fabrics to particle effects, every frame is a work of art.
On the subject of naturalism in this film, I was surprised to see real guns depicted. I'm a casual gun nut and a frequenter of the IMFDB (Internet Movie Firearms Data Base). If you aren't familiar with guns in cartoons find a cartoon with 1930's gangsters or GI-Joe or some other cartoon with guns and then look up some pictures of guns on google and compare. What's that? They don't look anything alike? Well that's because the only people crazy enough to fully animate guns accurately are the Japanese and only in a handful of cases. The animators of Rango seem to have done their homework and found several historical firearms to base their animations off of such as the Henry Rifle and the Winchester 1887 shotgun. When they animated the bullets they even showed them without any kind of jacketing on the projectile. However they couldn't resist the convention of a swing out cylinder even though Rango's SSA style revolver is a single action and those models did not have that feature. Realism was sacrificed for artistic license. Normally I wouldn't even bring any of this nit picking up but the animators really knew their guns and I applaud them for their efforts of realism.
As I said earlier Nickelodeon has been a backwater studio for several years. That they could pull of a movie like this astonishes me. Not only that, director Gore Verbinski has only made one movie that I truly liked and that was Pirates of the Caribbean. I think the real brains behind this project belong to writer John Logan who wrote such notables as The Aviator, The Last Samurai, and Gladiator. This clearly explains the grittiness of the film as this is his second kids' movie. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas was pretty awful but Logan clearly learned from his mistakes this time around.
As usual Johnny Depp gave a brilliant performance as the chameleon with no name, who is also an actor, a brilliant metaphor if I do say so myself. Depp's over the top performances have rubbed me the wrong way more than once but here his eccentric voice talent is perfectly cast as Rango changes personality constantly shifting from a British accent to a Southwest accent and back to normal American. While the cast was amazing all around Bill Nighy also stood out from the rest giving a wonderfully sinister performance as Rattlesnake Jake, basically oozing confident evil and masking his British accent beautifully Hugh Laurie style. I would also like to recognize Timothy Olyphant for pulling off an amazing Clint Eastwood impression. He only has a couple lines but he played them well enough that I couldn't tell the difference from the real thing.
So far Rango is my favorite movie of 2011. Its clever, shows incredible workmanship and artistic ability, and they clearly understood their source material. I only hope that the movie going public will recognize the gem that has been placed before them and that this film gets the recognitions it deserves.
Movies Referenced:
2011-Rango
2010-The Last Airbender
2009-9
2007-Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
2004-The Aviator
2003-The Last Samurai
2003-Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
2003-Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
2000-Gladiator
1998-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1991-An American Tail: Fival Goes West
1981-The Road Warrior
1974-Chinatown
1966-Django
1965-Cat Ballou
1964-A Fist Full of Dollars
