RANGO *****
Rango rocks big time! It is so rich in detail, fantastic characters and content that you will have to see it more than once. Johnny Depp adds great life to a new hero that is destined to steal many hearts. Gore Verbinski's imaginative vision and fine sense of humour pays homage to great westerns and cinematic heroes of the Wild West.  The CGI animation by veterans Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) celebrates the art of animation and is well supported by Hans Zimmer's glorious soundtrack. If you are looking for entertainment with a capital E, Rango is it, and much, much more. You only have to experience the great chase sequence of bats and lizards a brilliant allegory of Ride of the Valkerie's (including Wagner's haunting music) to appreciate great storytelling at its best.  The story tells of a pet chameleon with an identity crisis who end up in an Old West town called Dirt, which is populated by various desert critters garbed like characters out of a spaghetti western. As he's always thought himself a hero, Rango establishes himself as the lawman, strolling the streets as a sheriff-like character. Nothing can stop Rango from trying, constantly seeking to fit in with his surroundings, and save a town from dying.   Reviewed by Daniel Dercksen

GORE VERBINSKI TALKS ABOUT RANGO

On the Character Rango:
"He kind of fancies himself a hero and he's thrust into a crazy set of circumstances where he becomes one and he has to ultimately come to terms with the difference between pretending and what's real. People start believing in him. Our world is sort of Western. He's a contemporary character thrust into kind of a backwards Western genre, if you will."

Who is Rango Really?
"He's like a thespian in search of an audience. He's in his terrarium and he's made friends with the inanimate objects in his terrarium. He calls them all by name and actually when we meet him, he's in the process of putting on a play with various objects in his terrarium. Things get out of hand and the production goes down, literally. He's enlightened by his need for conflict, basically, and our story begins. We also have this Mexican Greek chorus of mariachis. They intro the tale and they follow him around singing of his whole demise. They break the fourth wall from time to time and keep us apprised as to the emotional state."

On His Voice Cast:
"We have a great cast. We have Abigail Breslin who plays Priscilla, Alfred Molina who plays Road Kill, this armadillo who's run over. It's part of the origin of Rango's demise, when his terrarium is thrust from his car and he ends up in the desert. Isla Fischer plays Beans. We have Bill Nighy who plays Rattlesnake Jake. Ned Beatty is the mayor. Harry Dean Stanton as Pappy."
Verbinski said Rango starts out in the present day but winds up in the West in the 1800s. "It's kind of a crazy mixed bag, contemporary and sort of throwback. He's the fish out of water."

On Designing the Characters of Rango:
"It really started with this concept of first just creating a sort of Western genre based on creatures of the desert. From there, I sat down with four of my favorite illustrators and just said, 'Let's conjure. Let's go.' That's the only rule. So snakes and tortoises and lizards and everything, so out of that we started to build iconography and first just very simple silhouettes and shapes. At the same time, we were working on the screenplay with John Logan and both things influenced each other. It was very much an open format process building a the narrative where art and scenes, Jim and I did all the voices, scratch voices and cut the whole thing on a Macintosh as an animatic. So it was just a bunch of these pencil sketches."
"After finishing a run of two Pirate movies, but even from The Ring to Pirates to Weather Man to two more Pirates movies, it was really an opportunity to take a pause and to sit back and go, 'Okay, let's get small,' basically. This is a project that I've been banging around since 2005, working with a children's book author named David Shannon and the producer John Carlos who produced Where the Wild Things Are. We've been sort of feeling out the idea of the project for a while. That was basically all we had. Rango came working with Jim, identity crisis, outsider coming into this world and we just sort of built it from scratch. Our intention was to create something that we liked. We hope there's enough people out there that like it too."

On Western Influences:
"We definitely have the classic John Ford, but there's a lot of spaghetti in there too, which I think has a little more irreverence. It's not as wholesome, if you will. It's kind of more of a postmodern Western. Wild Bunch I'm a fan of, the tail end of the genre more so than the kind of origins because it gets a little hokey when you go back to the 'bum ba dee da bum ba dee da.' So definitely Peckinpah and Leone."

On Johnny Depp's Involvement:
"We brought it up to Johnny during Pirates 2 because that's when we had the basic outline. We always just felt like he's very lizard-like, referred to quite a lot of his lizard run, lizard on ice, some of his physicalities are very lizard like, so he was really into it. A year and a half later we showed him a story reel and he loved it."

On Tackling an Animated Film:
"I never had a career plan so it's really kind of much more of a shoot from the hip, if there's an interesting story and you want to tell it, you figure out a way to tell it. [...]I've been blessed and lucky, but I didn't really set out to do an animated movie. I think it scares me. It's something I don't know how to do so I tend to be drawn to that, I guess. Ultimately, it just was a story. It seemed right. it was the right time. A lot of those techniques are the techniques we use in live action: storyboarding, letting visuals influence script, developing narrative based on visual as much as based on literary references. I can't say that it was part of a global plan."

On the Target Audience:
"I think if you're nine years old, you hit somebody on the head with a frying pan - it's funny. If you're 60-years-old, then you'll get a little bit of Jean Paul Sartre reference in there. It's just about keeping those things hopscotching so it plays for both worlds."

On making the leap from live-action to animation:
Well, I think it's really great to do something that you're not sure you can do. I've certainly thought that about The Ring and I thought that about the first Pirates. When you wake up at three in the morning in a cold sweat you're brain is just firing a lot faster, you're a little scared. And I just think it's growth when you pursue something you're not sure you can do. It's too hard a job I can always sell real estate for the rest of my life. Learn on the job training. That's what keeps me going. People ask me, "Would you make another animated movie?" as if animation is some genre, and there are 2,000 animated shots in the Pirates films, so it depends on the story. It really depends on the story, what it is about the story that I find compelling and a little dangerous.

On the experience of making a full-blown, 100% CGI animated:
I've never created a full story reel of a movie, this is my first time doing that, but certainly developed a very similar approach to elaborate action sequences. We felt quite comfortable, and my relationship with Hal Hickel and John Knoll and the guys at [Industrial Light and Magic], we've worked so much together. There's a language there that I had an opportunity to draw upon. You strike up relationships with people, you get a team together.

On getting the actors into the right mindset when they are just sitting in a booth.
I think everybody uses a technique that they're comfortable with. If you've never directed actors or you've spent a tremendous amount of time doing the story reel and recording voices, temp voices, the entire time, so becoming very attune to the pitch I want and they're trying things and failing and so you get that really sharp target. And I could see an animation director trying to hire an actor and have them do exactly what you've been doing for the last year and a half. But I got Ned Beatty and Harry Dean Stanton I'm going to see them together. This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents

On using cinematographer Roger Deakins as a visual consultant:
I called Roger about two months in when the lighting technicians were inundating me with questions about…let me jump back a bit. As we started to light scenes they moved the camera around and I think they expected the lights to stay in the same place and I was like, "We would never do that." I would do layout, which is a different process where it was all about camera, not about lighting, and it was cheating and moving. [Note: Where I was sitting there was a thermostat above my head and my chair was against a wall] I would put you somewhere else because the thermostat is too close to your head and this wall would go to do an over-the-shoulder and I would put a negative on the floor to reduce the fill light. We'd be having these discussions endlessly about how we do when we make a movie and I was just like, "Roger, help. Too many questions."
He came in and seemed to really enjoy what we were doing and had some great tips and then he was just basically at the end of a phone or an email. Every time we would set up a shot and start the lighting discussion I'd say, "Have you sent this to Roger yet?" There's always two suns in the movie because we always shoot that direction [points towards me] and then we shoot that direction [points away from me]. And usually we would orienting ourselves facing south, so we would get a decent light on there. For scenes that wasn't happening, in the computer you could just leave the sun there. So all of those discussions Roger was just… I have a rudimentary understanding of that, and so we'd talk at length about the look of the film and he was just at the end of a telephone whenever we needed him.

On using the cameo by Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta at the start of the movie, which is obviously a reference to Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Johnny Depp also starred.
I grew up reading all of Hunter's stuff and was certainly a fan. This one was a little random in the sense that the movie had been designed, almost the entire story reel was completed, the character Rango had been designed with this kind of tropical shirt and this attitude of Gonzo-ness, if you will. And then we were looking at the first reel and that sequence, with all of the chaos and cars and the bounding to the other, to the other, to the other, around the highway. "How can this be a little more interesting, because it feels just like an animated movie? Bouncing around, hitting windshields…" and somebody suggested, "What if we saw Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo driving through in the Cadillac?" And I was like, "No, no, it's not enough to see them drive through. He needs to at least hit the windshield and see Hunter S. Thompson react." And I knew immediately in this 16 month story reel that Johnny would just have a kick playing two characters.

On The Spirit of the West
I knew it was going to be a parody from the very beginning and in the early stages we had this concept that he's going to commune with The Spirit of the West, and what is that? And we just came to this conclusion that here's this actor who is very much in tune with Greek heroes and Shakespearian heroes and Sergio Leone - he's definitely clocked the fact that he's entered a western genre. So his hallucination or his communing with this eternal spirit, how would that manifest itself? And it just seemed obvious that it should be a Man With No Name in this identity quest. And then just hearing in my peripherals - I don't know what movie it was - I was just hearing this voice and I was like, "What's that?" And it was Timothy Olyphant. And I called him and he said, "I get that all the time."

THE ART OF ANIMATION

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