Rango tells a story of a pet chameleon with a very vivid imagination. He was used to leading a very comfortable life and would spend most of his time acting out dramatic scenes and being the star of his own little world he shared with a plastic yellow fish and a headless Barbie torso. Then, one day his terrarium fell out of his owner’s car and thus his epic adventure has begun.
Now Rangomight be an animated feature with talking animals but it’s really a classic Western at heart. Therefore where else could the poor lizard be stranded but in a desert? With some help from a fellow lizard named Beans he arrives to the dusty town of Dirt, where his taste for the theatrical leads him to invent a new persona for himself: he pretends to be a fearless drifter who goes by the name ‘Rango’ and soon finds himself in the role of the sheriff investigating the disappearance of the town’s water reserves.
There is a very goofy air about Rango, the character as well as the film. There is nothing particularly scary about it that would potentially upset or scare the younger viewers (except, maybe, for the mariachi band that keeps predicting the protagonist’s untimely death), it being a family film and all. And yet many critics noted that the film might be even more appealing to the adult viewers than to its target audience. Yes, Rango seems to be a more mature film than its animated rivals of 2011 such as Rio or Gnomeo and Juliet, or at least a film the adult audiences are more likely to enjoy to the same degree or even more than the children the film is marketed at. “Seems” is the key word here because while there undoubtedly are many adults who’ve found Rango to be very enjoyable, I would argue that most of them were film lovers who took pleasure in recognizing the many movie references scattered all over the screen. Indeed, it takes Rango mere seconds to go from spoofing Star Wars to paying homage to Apocalypse Now, while the plot itself is a mixture of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Chinatown. But self-referentiality is nothing special in this day and age, since even the Twilight-movies have discovered it by now.
Movies & Chocolate 