Rango-Review

The good, the bad and the animated: still from Rango. Photograph: Industrial Light & Magic

Rango, Gore Verbinski's sophisticated, extremely amusing CGI animated movie, a cartoon for adults as opposed to an adult cartoon, is set in the American west, populated by all manner of animals and reptiles. It combines past and present in telling the story of the lizard Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp, who appeared in Jim Jarmusch's not dissimilar westernDead Man) as a would-be gunslinger who tangles with some crooks stealing water from a desert town called Dirt.

It's a conflation of Once Upon a Time in the West and Chinatown, with clever impersonations of John Huston and Clint Eastwood by Ned Beatty and Tim Olyphant and a pastiche score in the manner of Ennio Morricone by Hans Zimmer. Roger Deakins, who should have won an Oscar as director of photography on True Grit, is credited as visual consultant.


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