Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When Rango, a lost family pet, accidentally winds up in the gritty, gun-slinging Western town of Dirt, the theater-loving lizard suddenly finds himself the newly appointed sheriff. Welcomed as the last hope the town has been waiting for, Rango is forced to play his new role to the hilt and uncover the truth behind a looming water crisis—before his act catches up with him.
Rango is a genuinely singular piece of animation — a psychedelic, deconstructionist Western that Gore Verbinski and ILM crafted with startling photorealistic lighting and texture unprecedented for an animated film. The vocal performances, led by Depp, are committed and eccentric in the best way, and the supporting cast of desert creatures is memorably voiced. Cinematography earns a 4 for its extraordinary visual ambition: framing, lighting, and depth-of-field work that consciously apes Sergio Leone and Chinatown. Novelty is high because no animated film before or since has occupied quite this tonal and aesthetic space — a genuinely adult-skewing, surrealist Western in kids'-film clothing. The plot, however, is a fairly standard hero's-journey/corruption-in-power arc with the water-scarcity MacGuffin borrowed from Chinatown, limiting it to a solid 3. The ending, while satisfying, leans into familiar Western redemption beats without fully surprising.