Solitary deserts, crossed by roads most travelled

Rating: Null/10 (20 June 2011)

Our storytelling notions as evolved in the past 2,000 years are basically ideal templates of what it means to live a meaningful life; what sacrifices to make, why to persevere and what actually matters in the end. It would be interesting if we could somehow know if the chronicles followed the first epic journey or if man embarked upon it to fulfill his place in the legend; at any rate, whatever journeys took place, the epic seems to be the bard's connotation.
We have here one such thing that weaves together both the telling and what pre-existed it, where all the mechanisms of that Campbellian hero journey are self-consciously laid on top. The hero (not yet the hero) yanked from life by some unforeseen circumstance, thrown into a path foiled by the ironies of distant fates where he must search inside for a heroic sacrifice that serves as a lesson to the world. A path, which once travelled to the destination, will invite others to it.
The beauty of that self-consciousness lies in how the filmmaker whimsically indulges it. So in the beginning we get the hero (not yet the hero) removed from life inside a glass cage, where he enacts various stories (none of them his, all imagined). Over the course of the movie we see elements of these stories come magically alive, so that reality eventually conforms with what was imagined of it.
The added effect is that all this takes place in the world of the western, the cinematic world imprinted with the legends of the bards, Ford or Leone. What the filmmaker strives to do here is not so much to unearth what reality pre-existed the myth, but to expose myth for its addled romance as it is about to be swept away by a new reality.
So we have two swathes of solitary desert separated by the road most travelled, a symbolic way across which we understand the rite of passing will be enacted. On the other end of it waits the Spirit of the West, a familiar sight wearing a poncho yet now oddly playing golf.
What connects them is the plot from Chinatown, where corrupt plutocrats are scheming to usurp complete power and the only ones who can stand in their way are those old gunslinging legends, real or imagined, who will be swept away by the outcome. Like in Peckinpah 40 years ago.
The cuteness we sensibly expect from animation is peppered through this. There is the impossible action spectacle, the shenanigans. But it's not a film for children. The driving idea will be probably lost on them; how the quest here is not to save a dusty town from drought, but to sever the illusions that hide our true face from us. How although we embark on various journeys through life having assumed one identity or another, these journeys can be properly seen through by a self-less self.
"I am nobody" as Rango says, perhaps echoing that other Johnny Depp western that tried to achieve emptiness.
In doing so even the chronicles, here disguised as three Mexican owls singing about the eventual demise of the hero, will be proved wrong. Which is to say that no fate exists other than what we accept.
We get a bunch of things here, all of them pretty exceptional for an animation film. Most of them better than what we find in regular films of this ilk. Pixar hasn't come close.