The slightly surreal animated story begins when a pet chameleon’s terrarium crashes in the desert — marooning him with a paper umbrella, a nude and headless Barbie and a wind-up fish.
So the little fellow starts walking, accompanied by an all-owl mariachi band — and finds himself in a town straight out of a Sergio Leone Western, complete with scrofulous villagers and low-life hired guns.
The Leone references soon start piling up (along with the Ennio Morricone musical cues). But there’s also a big nod to “
Chinatown” (in its own way, a modern Western). And some odd, purely original touches — like a mystic armadillo — that come out of nowhere.
The originality may be deep in the DNA — Depp sometimes makes mistakes, but he never makes anything you’d expect him to, and director Gore Verbinski (who worked with him on the first few “
Pirates of the Caribbean” movies) is making his first cartoon.
Even better, the movie uses animators from Industrial Light and Magic who are also new to extended feature-film work.
So what’s here doesn’t look like the perfect, spit-and-polish work we’re used to.
It’s its own thing — and sometimes, admitted, it gets lost in its own wanderings. The story easily could have been sped up by five or 10 minutes. And although the late appearance of one movie icon is fine, an invocation of “Apocalypse Now” is both old and off-track.
But Depp, happily disembodied, has a fine time with Rango, who — being a chameleon — is constantly assuming different identities, and he’s nicely partnered by the work of Isla Fisher, voicing his plucky pioneer love.
Adults and slightly older children should have a great time.
Will the movie appeal to the youngest toddlers? Probably not. Its rattlesnake villain is a little too scary and even its nicest characters are so ugly they’re likely to disgust small tots (and some of the indulgent adults who accompany them).
So as a safe, preschool matinee — yeah, it’s a little iffy.
But as a midnight movie, it’s going to have a long, long life.
