Monday, July 25, 2011

Rango

Rango got off to a bit of a slow start, but for the most part I had a great time with it. The animation was amazing, so good, in fact, that at times the creatures seemed real. The voice acting was about as good as it gets. Ned Beatty does a great John Huston, and who knew that Timothy Olyphant could channel Clint Eastwood? Johnny Depp was even better than I expected.

The drought-inspired story has a special resonance for us Texans. It pays homage to a wide (and wild) variety of sources: Chinatown, Star Wars, and just about every spaghetti western ever made, for starters. The big set piece is a chase scene that's really wonderful. This isn't up there with the Pixar features, but it's still very entertaining.

6 comments:

Deb said...

I'm still baffled as to why this was marketed to kids. My two youngest (aged 13) saw it on a school field trip and said that most of the references were lost on a majority of the students. (Being my children, they had naturally seen most of the movies to which RANGO pays hommage.)

Unknown said...

Animated = Kids in Hollywood's thinking. This one was certainly aimed at adults.

Anonymous said...

Well this one may be the one animated film I see this year, after your review, Bill.

Pixar did such a great job with UP and then lost me with the following ones, and the rest of the animated ones didn't even sound interesting.

Unknown said...

Judy was a lot less enthusiastic than I was. So beware.

Marsdon said...

I liked this a lot but I did feel that it was about 20 minutes too long.

Unknown said...

Definitely took too long to get going.