I really like cartoons and animation. I'm an actor, but even I have to admit that I get tired of looking at people. It's not that they're not fascinating, it's just that they also populate the real world. Cartoons don't have to follow the same rules. It's a great art form that extends back to cave paintings, but for some reason a lot of modern cartoons marketed as 'family entertainment' are complete shit. (For every Fantastic Mr. Fox, there's five Alvin and the Chipmunk Sqequels making loads more money for some godforsaken reason, but I digress.) So that was my expectations for Rango, a film I had no intention of seeing but I went with someone who did, and was immediately 'turned on' to it.
Well, for starters the protagonist is a 'thespian.' We are introduced to him staging a play inside a tank. Furthermore, the protagonist always remarks upon being a protagonist, and it gives the film a strange existentialist feel. The feel pervades throughout, with the exception of the final act, I honestly had know idea where the film the was going. While that might test the patience of some younguns, for me it was liberating because I get so tired of going through the same plot conventions all the time, and animated films tend to fall into that trap due to decree from the czar Disney and, to some extent, Aristotle. But this movie acknowledges it's a pastiche in a way that is more stimulating than mere rib jabbing. As the plot attempts to gel the characters even comment about how it must fall into place. It's an infectious dough of postmoderism being poured into a pan shaped like classicism. We are set up for the heroes journey archetype by a gruesome piece of roadkill, that made me uncomfortable at first, but as I adjusted I was slowly giving in to the magical realism to follow.
However, the movie is more exciting than I'm making it sound, but it isn't a litany of frenetic action scenes. The action is pretty well-crafted, and even integral to the plot. We go through a the motions of an edgy film noir-like Western, but it doesn't feel like going through the motions. I feels new and old at the same time.
It truly is a cartoon in the best sense of the word. Cartooning is different from animation. Sure it's an animated film, but this is a great cartoon. Take a look at the characters. They're hideous! They're stereotypical caricatures. Now I took a cartooning class when I was a kid, and I remember a rule was to take a slight imperfection and magnify it. So, sometimes with love, it's basically using exaggeration to make fun of people. It has the same purpose as satire. These are what the best cartoons are like, from the old Fleischer cartoons to Warner Brothers to Ralph Bakshi. And often times they aren't for kids. Kids can watch them, well not Bakshi, but they aren't necessarily for them. They're harsh and subversive, silly but sophisticated, they can be angry, or have a real perverse streak. In other words, it's an authentic form of expression, and such is Rango, which is a statemnt about finding your place in the world. It's probably more fun than I'm making it sound.
