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The new Johnny Depp confab with Pirates of the Caribbean captain Gore Verbinski wasn't screened by WW press deadlines, which doesn't stop it from being of the most delightful cartoons of the year.
Rango
WW Critic's Score: 82
Toward the end of Rango, the titular animated Hawaiian-shirted chameleon—shamed by his confession to the small town where he had recently been anointed sheriff, that he is not the skilled gunslinger he'd led them to believe he is—attempts suicide by closing his eyes and wandering blindly across a busy stretch of highway. Miraculously, he makes it to the other side, where he lapses into unconsciousness. He awakens in a washed-out patch of desert. Before him is a golf cart stocked with award statuettes, driven by a man with parched features wearing a pancho and a dusty cowboy hat. Rango, voiced with flair by Johnny Depp, identifies him as the Spirit of the West. The lizard asks if he is in heaven.
"If this were heaven," the spirit gruffly replies, "we'd be eating Pop-Tarts with Kim Novak."
That whooshing noise is the sound of that entire scene soaring over the head of every child in the theater.
If there's a criticism to lob at Gore Verbinski's wildly entertaining existentialist cartoon Western, it's that he made an existentialist cartoon Western aimed at kids. Ninety-five percent of the stuff that makes Rango so fun is going to be lost on its target demographic, unless Chinatown (from which it cribs part of its plot) and Sergio Leone flicks have suddenly become popular among grade schoolers. It's an homage to films made decades before they were born, loaded with complicated, fast-paced dialogue and themes no child should understand until he or she is old enough to wonder if their entire life has been a fraud. Yes, Rango fails to hit the grace note Pixar plays so well, making a movie that appeals effortlessly to both adults and children without pandering to either.
Y'know what, though? Not every animated movie has to be Toy Story—especially when it's as much of a fucking blast as this one. Admittedly, there isn't a whole lot going on beneath the surface, but again, since when did every cartoon have to make us weep? Energy and imagination go a long way, and Rango is one of the most stylishly exhilarating animated films to emerge from a non-Pixar studio in years. In the course of its 107 minutes, we're given: a Dali-esque dream sequence; a chase scene through a canyon featuring rodents flying on the backs of dive-bombing bats and set to a bluegrass rendition of "Flight of the Valkyries;" a climatic water-soaked duel between Rango and a rattlesnake (given true menace by Bill Nighy) with a Gatling gun at the end of its tail; a blink-and-miss-it cameo from the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson; and a world populated by creatures that look like they could've crawled out from under the floorboards of the Mos Eisley Cantina (don't tell George Lucas, but one character resembles an Ewok, and Rango's reptilian love interest is a dead ringer for Jar Jar Binks).
So, yeah, there's a lot going on, sometimes a bit too much. But Verbinski's enthusiasm for what is essentially a pastiche love letter to classic cinema bursts through the clutter. And everything looks spectacular. Best of all, it's all rendered in 2D, allowing the colors normally dimmed by three-dimensionality to pop off the screen. And that should be enough to hold most children in thrall as the one-liners and dense wordplay whiz past them. Parents should be prepared to explain to their kids what a mammogram is, though. PG.
Rango opens today at multiple locations; find showtimes here.
WWeek 2015