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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Rango

RANGO (Gore Verbinski). 107 minutes. Opens Friday (March 4). For venues, trailers, and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNNN


Rango feels like an animated movie by Quentin Tarantino, but minus the expletives.

That’s bad news maybe for kids, whose brains will itch at all the existential banter and references to Sergio Leone, Hunter S. Thompson and Chinatown (don’t worry, they left the incest out). But it’s great news for adults, particularly genre aficionados, who will be delighted by this peculiar, snappy and delightful riff on spaghetti westerns that masquerades as a family movie.

Johnny Depp, teaming up again with his Pirates Of The Caribbean director, Gore Verbinski, voices the titular pet lizard who somehow gets lost and ends up marshalling a town full of colourful critters who are desperate for water.

Rango bucks current conventions by staying 2-D, yet it’s filled to the brim with exhilarating scenery, boasting textured images that make you exhale a big “Wow.” Only Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E before it have achieved such visual feats. A glass of whisky, called “cactus juice” for the kids, looks golden and syrupy. Grains of sand move individually.

And the lighting…. That’s right, there’s lighting! The filmmaking team consulted with the Coen brothers’ regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins, to fill in light and shadows, which they brilliantly reproduced – on a Mac, no doubt.

As a movie made with new technology that innovatively uses old-school techniques, Rango pushes the possibilities for animation ahead of 3-D. Take that, James Cameron.

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