It’s impossible not to get caught up in the beguil ing visuals of “Rango,” an ultra-quirky animated Western with a vocal tour de force by Johnny Depp that’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
The first major-studio ‘toon in some time that doesn’t employ 3-D technology presents colors and textures so vividly (courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic) that it still manages to become the most immersive cinema experience since “Avatar.”
This will be a four-star attraction for some, but for all of the film’s considerable charms, by the end I was getting a bit antsy from the rambling script and direction by, respectively, John Logan (“Gladiator”) and Gore Verbinski (the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy).
Depp voices the title character, nameless at first, a coddled pet chameleon who is accidentally separated from his master and stranded in the Mojave Desert.
Eventually he finds himself in a miniature western town named Dirt, where he acquires his new name and the post of sheriff after inventing a story about killing seven brothers with a single bullet.
The intricately designed Dirt is populated by a fascinating-looking collection of lizards, moles, amphibians and other critters. They include the mayor (Ned Beatty), a wizened, wheelchair-bound turtle who has engineered a water shortage to buy up property.
This “Chinatown”-inspired plot is basically an excuse for a parade of highly inventive sight gags and manic riffing by Depp, who gives perhaps the most inspired voice performance since Robin Williams in “Aladdin.”
Western tropes from John Ford to Sergio Leone make appearances, with a detour into Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” featuring a rattlesnake with a machine-gun barrel in his tail.
There’s even a hilarious appearance by a certain Man With No Name — voiced by Timothy Olyphant, one of many standouts in an excellent voice cast that includes Bill Nighy, Ray Winstone and Harry Dean Stanton.
An homage to “Apocalypse Now” with flying mice is impressive — at least initially. Verbinski’s tendency to beat gags to death, increasingly apparent in the “Pirates” series, lets “Rango” drag on for about 20 minutes past its ideal length.
While the visuals may be equal to or better than those in the Pixar features, that studio is renowned for tight scripts and pruning shots that don’t really advance the story. There are an awful lot of them here.
Beans, Rango’s putative love interest voiced by Isla Fisher, serves no function other than to reassure some audience members who might otherwise have questions about his fondness for musical theater and cross-dressing.
“Rango” is being marketed as a family movie, but the humor seems more aimed at adults than children. The younger kids at the screening I attended seemed largely confused or bored, and afterward I saw some parents trying to calm down little ones scared by a more intense ending than you’d expect from a PG rating.