I’ m gonna metformin hcl 500 mg weight loss say that the western is making a long-overdue comeback. With True Grit earning a Best Picture nomination at this year’s Oscars, and Cowboys & Aliens coming out this summer (SO stoked for that one), it seems that Hollywood, and movie-goers, are again embracing the tales of gun-slinging cowboys. And now we’ve got an animated western to feed the fire in Rango, the newest film from Nickelodeon Movies.
Johnny Depp metformin 500 mg for weight loss voices the title character, the ‘lizard-with-no-name’ in this tale. Its a pretty typical plot for the genre: lizard comes to town, impresses the local critters with stories of his past heroics, and local critters make the stranger-lizard the new sheriff, in hopes that he’ll defeat the bad critters threatening the town’s livelihood. In this case, the thing to be saved is water, the essential resource for maintaining life in the desert. But of course, this being an animated feature, and more of a comedy, there is a lot more enhancing this classic plotline. The greatest variation lies in the character of Rango himself. He is a loner, not by choice, but because he’s literally been stuck in a box for his whole life up to being bounced out of a car onto the highway. He desperately wants to interact with others and be the hero of his own story, instead of pretending in his one-lizard theatrical productions. He’s quirky and funny (character traits at which Depp specializes), and really good at improv, which helps him keep ahead of the varmints who want to him dead.
There are also little comedic gems roaming throughout the script, some paying homage/poking fun at classic westerns. The town is called ‘Dirt,’ making it feel just about as middle-of-nowhere as you could imagine. My favorites though are the physical elements of characters’ surroundings, reminders of their actual diminutive size, being animals and all. Examples: The building for the post office is an actual mailbox and (the winner) the outhouse is a Pepto-Bismol bottle. They kept reminding me of another animated western, An American Tale: Fievel Goes West, a classic.
Speaking of surroundings, this movie looks spectacular. Rango is the first feature animated film done by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and their digital effects expertise surely shows. The environments are so detailed that you often forget that this thing doesn’t use filmed scenery like Disney’s feature, Dinosaur. And I wish the lighting team could get their own reward for their work on this film. It is absolutely gorgeous (and with ILM at the helm, its no wonder). There is one scene where the characters are in a tunnel with the only light coming from the torches (matchsticks) they’re carrying. I didn’t want it to end just so I could just keep watching the flickers of the flames dancing on the characters’ faces. The character design is certainly unique. Again, its very detailed, and the facial expressions are pin-point accurate, almost making the animal characters look more like humans. Unfortunately, on the actual human characters (of which there are very few), this effect comes off as more surreal.
A lot of the success of the character animation comes from the way in which director Gore Verbinski chose to record the actors, and this method is largely what makes this movie so unique to me. Instead of recording the voices in individual sound booths, Verbinski had everyone actually act out the scenes together in a white room with a few costumes and props. He recorded the voices and filmed the action at the same time as reference for the animators. Film reference has been used as a tool in animated features before, but hardly ever with the actual voice performers and certainly not for the entire film. It was quite a feat, that some may argue was unnecessary for the final film, but the result was two-fold. It enhanced the animators’ work with definitive references for character movement and expressions (which, as already stated, was highly developed), and it also enhanced the actors’ performances as they were able to act off of one another instead of in the vacuum of the sound booth. Watching the video of these sessions is almost as entertaining as watching the final product, due in no small part to the stellar cast, including Bill Nighy (no stranger to the motion-capture method of animation from his role of Davy Jones in The Pirates of the Caribbean films) and Ned Beatty (here in the part of an old turtle mayor with a personality reminiscent of his fuzzy stuffed bear persona in Toy Story 3).
Rounding out the package is a great score by Hans Zimmer, enhanced with the mariachi interludes of Rick Garcia and an ending theme by Los Lobos. Rango really is a smorgasbord of talent, but I consider the true stars of this film to be the animators at ILM. The world they have created is so awash with pinpoints of realism that you’d think this movie was just shot out in the Mojave Dessert. You know, with the critters’ voices simply dubbed over so we get that star-power. I’m still trying to figure out how they got that one owl to learn the accordion…
Overall: 8/10
Directed by Gore Verbinski. Written by John Logan, with Gore Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit. Production Design by Mark “Crash” McCreery. Art Direction by John Bell. Original Music by Hans Zimmer. Edited by Craig Wood.
Starring: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy
