08 March 2011

Rango

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This is one of the strangest “kids’” movies I’ve seen in a long time. For one, it isn’t made by Pixar yet does not suck, and for another it’s rated PG and includes smoking, children pointing guns at themselves, intoxicating beverages, death, and references to films that no PG-aged child has any business seeing in my idea of a PG-oriented home. All of these things and more add up to a damn good animated film that’s pretty much a lock for Best Animated Feature in the third month of the year.

Gore Verbinski and ILM have teamed up to create a spaghetti-western homage unlike anything before it, for the simple fact that it’s CG. To add to that, it’s got probably the best character designs I’ve seen in any CG film so far, and although it’s in the guise of a children’s film, the dialogue pulls very few punches in its fast-paced and sometimes college-level vocabulary. It’s a simple story of course, but the humor on the byways is just awesome.

To get back to the character designs; everyone in this movie is ugly. Straight up. And it’s fantastic. Shrek was supposed to be ugly, but he’s really not. Rango is an asymmetrical, bumbling, bug-eyed mess, and it benefits the character in spades. The variety of the appearance in the other characters is staggering, aside from maybe the love-interest, whose look doesn’t differ that much from Rango’s aside from an attempt to make her look at least slightly attractive, which I think ended up being a detriment. This sort of ugliness is similar to the look that directors like Terry Gilliam bring out in their work, and I’m a big fan of it.

As far as film references go I’m afraid I probably missed the majority, but those I caught had me stamping my feet with happiness. The best I thought was the chase scene depicted in the picture above, in which our heroes are pursued on a wagon through a canyon by moles with guns on bats. For some odd reason the bats tended to start spinning out of control and exploding on the canyon walls when shot. I was also informed of a scene I didn’t catch near the beginning, in which the two main characters from Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas make an actual split-second cameo. I’ll be paying more attention next time.

Johnny Depp’s performance was pretty good. I think he fit the bill quite well, and you could really see his performance in the animation, which was created in a rather neat way; Depp’s motions were filmed for each scene, but instead of motion capture, the animators simply used the footage as reference, inserting their own skills into the sequences to keep it artistically valid and therefore much more entertaining. I hope this becomes a precedent.

To top it all off, it’s not 3D! Awesome! Screw George Lucas!

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