Cute animated wild-west tale with little creatures of the desert.

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2011)

Absolutely the best things about this movie are the superb animation, and the superb voice acting by the main actors. The story itself is just OK, it is a parody of sorts of old time western movies.
Johnny Depp is really amazingly good as the voice of Rango. He isn't Rango from the very beginning, in fact I suppose he has no name. But in the dusty town of DIRT, when pressed by the locals for a name, he sees 'Durango' on the side of a container and takes the last 5 letters as his own, 'Rango'.
The very beginning of the story looks out of place, we have this very imaginative, theatrical chameleon interacting with small plastic play figures. Soon we realize he is in a terrarium, and then quickly he finds himself outside, on the road, in the scorching desert, a place this chameleon never wanted to be. But he meets an armadillo that has just been run over, and he 'follows his shadow' in the search for water.
Rango's acting talents pay off when he gets to the town of 'Dirt', in desperate need of a new sheriff, he convinces everyone he is a dangerous lizard and a hero.
Pretty Isla Fisher voices Beans, a different type of desert lizard. I like to try to identify voices and I really thought it was Reese Witherspoon, and Fisher is really good in her characterization.
Similarly, Ned Beatty voices the Mayor, an old turtle, and I really thought it was Harve Presnell, who was the wealthy father-in-law in Fargo.
Towards the end of the movie, Rango encounters a human figure, that was remarkable in its facial details, and my wife and I immediately said 'Clint Eastwood'. But it was Timothy Olyphant as the voice of the Spirit of the West. So my guessing wasn't very good for this movie, and the vocal acting was uniformly superb.
Anyway, this is a cute and entertaining animated movie, the theme being that whoever controls the water, in the desert, controls everything. Rango has to figure this out, and along with a band of Dirt residents find the way to get water back to Dirt.