Rango 2011
I had wanted to see this movie earlier, but I finally managed to catch it on cable. This animated movie features a pet chameleon who gets lost in and finds himself in the middle of a spaghetti Western, where instead of Italians, the cast is filled with desert animals like moles, rattlesnakes, turtles, etc., in a town that is literally drying up and looking for a new source of water. The movie borrows from Chinatown and Johnny Depp’s Rango borrows a lot from Don Knotts, as an imaginative, but incompetent hero who is luckier than he is capable.
The movie is too weird for its own good sometimes (a talking run over armadillo, plus a lot of the mean characters are just kind of disturbing looking). It is an offbeat cast and not always in a funny way. But I thought it was fun to watch, if nothing else for all the references to other movies. Some of the animation is quite good with a lot of highly stylized characters. I do think some of it could be pretty disturbing for little kids.
Update: For some reason I wound up buying the Blu-ray (well, because it was on sale). The movie looks very good in HD and I enjoyed watching it again, though I still feel like it is a little too weird for its own good sometimes. I enjoyed watching the extras of how they made the movie, thoroughly storyboarding everything out and tweaking drawings of all the characters, then recording the entire movie using the crew’s voices. That’s probably the way it usually goes, but when they did the voice recordings of the actors they had the cast on a sound stage with some props and costumes so they could feel more in character and interact. Usually cartoons are voiced by actors in booths by themselves. It is hard to say if the end result is that different, but I will say that Johnny Depp’s voice is hard to recognize and I think if Disney had done it they would want the voice to be more recognizable, though Depp is a natural for this character. It seems like all of the preparation up front allowed them to get the actors together whereas usually the actors come back for additional sessions as the story develops.
Written: 14 Dec 2013
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital