DVD review: Rango

Rango, a pet chameleon, ends up in a western style town.

This movie, according to the people who made it, is an attempt to do a western style animated feature, just a little bit adult oriented. The end result is an odd affair which earned rave reviews and an Oscar.

First, as it all too often happens with those reviews, they are mainly made by professional, or at least people deeply invested into moviedom. The problem with that is that so called “movie’s movies” tend to aggregate much better reviews than simpler affairs.

Rango certainly is a movie for movie fans. It is littered with movie citations and the whole structure liberally rips off the Dollar trilogy of Eastwood fame mixing it up with non sequitur, animal puns and LSD inspired spiritual trips.

Is this better than classical animated fare or at least more profound? Not really but is at least as good as that.

In the end what they made is a much quirkier than usual product, with a distinct independent cinema atmosphere.

The animations are made by ILM, Industrial Light and Magic, their first fully animated feature, with the direction in the competent hands of Gore Verbinski. It’s all very competent stuff, but honestly they still need a little bit to get to the level of the giants of animation.

Conclusion: An interesting experiment, recommended to adult fans of animation. The kids I fear want get most of the stuff.