Having just seen this recently, it's any kid's gateway drug to Western cinema.

Rating: 8/10 (17 September 2018)

Rango is a kid's film that knows the confines of family entertainment whilst trying to simultaneously break them as well: this movie has smoking, drinking and gunfights-galore, something that American animated movies tend to steer clear of. This one has all the archetypal characters you'd see in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti-Westerns and John Ford's Hollywood-Westerns, except they're computer-animated animals in a Nickelodeon production (the same guys who gave us Spongebob and Rugrats) and it's amazing that they'd let such taboo themes and imagery in a kids movie in the first place.
How does this tale of a happy-go-lucky modern-world lizard against an Old-West backdrop convey the juxtapositions of modernism and that of the American frontier? It's surprising that Rango is that kind of movie: it's a comedy-adventure movie with hints of cinematically classical themes of good vs evil and told in ways that aren't boringly derivative of other movies prior to this one. Rango succeeds in being kid-friendly while trying to use that status to show how subversive the final product can be compared to other animated movies on the market.
Rango is a rock-solid 4/5 stars for me.