This week is a bit of a breach in protocol.
So far I’ve tried to progress through Westerns in some pseudo-chronological order, lumping films that shared directors, actors or styles together when it worked.
Instead of moving on from Spaghetti Westerns to something that made more sense, I opted to skip forty years of movies and jump to 2011’s animated kids flick, Rango.
Rango grabbed my attention prior to its release earlier this year with its character designs.
Combining anthropomorphized cartoon critters with life like skin, fir and feathers the movie had an off-beat stop motion feel to it, which I find incredibly hard to resist. None of the characters were cute, in fact a lot of them were pretty ugly, which worked well with the tone of things, but that’s all surface stuff.
Rango, in addition to being a bizarre little Western, also proved to be one of the most thematically ambitious kids movies I’ve seen in ages.
Rarely ever dipping into super-silly, eye-rolling antics and often very dark and scary, Rango is always thought provoking.
The film opens with the title lizard contemplating his place in the world. The world, as far as Rango is concerned, is the aquarium he shares with a headless, naked Barbie torso, a plastic tree and a wind up fish. Rango—a chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp—considers him self an actor and a hero in the narrative sense. As he realizes that what his life needs is conflict and interaction with other players, his tank is thrown out of the back of his owner’s station wagon, literally shattering the only reality he ever knew and sending him on a quest into the desert to find…something.
He soon finds his way into a ragtag Wild West town where he spins a tale of gunslinging daring-do, accidentally slays the hawk that terrorizes the townsfolk and becomes the newest in a long line of sheriffs.
Rango’s knowledge of how these sorts of stories work—no doubt from watching lots of movies from the safety of his old aquarium—allows him to masquerade somewhat adequately as the new lawman. What plays out is a classic tale of manipulation and deceit that borrows just as much from Chinatown as it does from Westerns and features memorable characters and some truly thrilling action scenes.
After being called out as a fraud, Rango wanders the desert is a wonderfully trippy montage and eventually meets The Spirit of the West, represented by a very familiar Man With No Name. This is one of several nods for film buffs and parents who might be watching along with their kids. There’s also a quick glimpse of Hunter S. Thompson, another famous Depp character who went West searching for meaning in a desert full of bats and lizards.
Rango’s quest, and eventual exile and heroic return, is less about loud, slapsticky hysteria and more about the quiet moments between the big set pieces. It’s about figuring out who you are and how you work in a scary world where people can’t always be taken at face value and how a name and reputation might be able to carry you so far, but ultimately its your actions that define you as the person or chameleon you want to be.
Rango is both a kid-friendly—and anything but dumbed down—love letter to the Western and an examination of what makes us who we are.
Most importantly, it’s a kid’s movie that, in a world of Smurfs and an upcoming THIRD Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, engages as much as it entertains. It’s not a soulless shill for pop culture.
It uses well-informed pop culture traditions to create something fresh and exciting.
