Rango · reception & legacy

2011 · Gore Verbinski

How Rango has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Well reviewed on release and an Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature, but 2011 audiences mostly filed it as 'that weird lizard movie' too strange for kids; the internet has since canonised it as one of the great animated films of the 2010s and Exhibit A for a risk-taking studio era that no longer exists.

What's debated

The perennial fight is whether Rango is secretly one of the best Westerns of the century or just a hyper-referential pastiche — usually alongside the claim that it isn't really a children's film at all.

Its footprint

The Fear and Loathing cameo — Rango bouncing off the windshield of Hunter S. Thompson's convertible, a wink at Johnny Depp's other gonzo role — is one of the most-cited Easter eggs in modern animation, and the film itself has become online shorthand for 'they don't make them like this anymore.'

Where it stands

A Letterboxd darling and steady canon climber: the beloved odd-one-out among Animated Feature winners that cinephiles bring up whenever anyone laments the state of studio animation.

★ Did you know? Verbinski recorded the cast with what he called 'emotion capture' — the actors performed scenes together on a soundstage with props and costumes instead of alone in a booth — and legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins served as visual consultant on what was ILM's first fully animated feature.

Named by the director

Influences Gore Verbinski has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Chinatown (1974) — Verbinski openly built the water-conspiracy plot as a nod to Polanski's film.
Sergio Leone — Verbinski cited Leone's spaghetti Westerns as the visual and tonal template for the film's desert-town showdowns.