A lizard with a six shooter

Rango (2011)

Rango is a domesticated pet chameleon who dreams of big stardom as a great actor. But his aquarium gets thrown out of a car and he ends up in the desert of the wild west. Fighting his way through the scorching heat of the desert sun, an eagle looking for a meal and other dangers on his way, he winds up in a little town called Dirt. Dirt is an outlawed town where only the strongest survive. It's filled with all sorts of critters and everyone seems to be after water. Soon Rango finds himself as the sheriff of Dirt and needs to figure out what has happened to the water supply. The story follows familiar paths from spaghetti westerns and that homage to the genre one of the best aspects of the movie. Spaghetti western fans will find tons of references to pretty much all of the classics and quite a many jokes related to them. Another thing I liked about this were the characters, they aren't the usual cute little animals, these are reptiles, amphibians and other critters that usually don't pop in mind when thinking of something cute. But they are not nasty looking disgusting things, there's still enough character in them that they actually turn out to be quite cute. And most of all they fit the spaghetti western story very well. The comedy was aimed mostly at the adult audience, so don't know if kids can get as much out of this, but at least I surely had fun. Though there is enough of slapstick so I bet the kids can enjoy it as well. Johnny Depp puts on a brilliant show and genuinely seems to enjoy his part, so that was of course a great plus. Unfortunately the rest of the cast didn't shine out as much, but then again there wasn't much of a script for them either. Though I must mention that I was actually surprised that Spirit of the West wasn't played by Clint Eastwood, so props for Timothy Olyphant for the Clint impersonation. The look was quite good also with many shot setups straight from the classic spaghetti westerns and at parts even the music sounded like it would have been made by Ennio Morricone. So there are lots of great things in this one and surely it was a refreshingly different kind of animation, but would have hoped a bit better casting on the smaller roles and a bit tighter script.
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