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Industrial Light & Magic/Paramount Pictures

Johnny Depp provides the voice of the title character, center, in the animated film “Rango.” Isla Fisher supplies the voice of his romantic interest, a spirited frontier creature called Beans, right. More Photos »

There’s a New Sheriff in Town, and He’s a Rootin’-Tootin’ Reptile

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Feature animation currently finds itself in a golden age of mediocrity, with sensationally inventive technical means tethered, more often than not, to drab and cynical imaginative ends. The perennial Pixar exception tends to prove a dreary rule: as animated movies claim an ever bigger share of money and attention — drawing cross-generational, demographically diverse audiences more readily than most other films — they rely more and more on manic, synthetic formulas.

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And so, a half-dozen times a year, parents and children line up for overscaled, noisy genre pastiches crammed with yammering movie-star voice work, eye-straining action sequences and tacked-on sermons about the importance of being yourself, following your dream or sticking by your friends and family. Even at their best (again noting the Pixar exception), these movies are like theme-park rides and other big-ticket corporate amusements — thrilling while they last and then quickly forgotten.

All of the above should apply to “Rango,” a tongue-in-cheek western (a lizard’s tongue, at that) directed by Gore Verbinski, who is best known for helping to turn a theme-park ride (Disney World’s “Pirates of the Caribbean”) into a dizzyingly successful movie franchise. But the odd thing about “Rango” is that unlike so many of its peers, it is odd. In spite of a profile that should place it alongside “Megamind” and “Despicable Me” and the long list of other overblown, have-fun-or-else cartoons, this rambling, anarchic tale is gratifyingly fresh and eccentric. Much of the time you don’t quite know where it is going, which is high praise indeed given the slick predictability that governs most other entertainments of its kind.

Perhaps this should not be too surprising, since Mr. Verbinski, especially in the first installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, showed a distinctive visual style and a genuinely off-beat sensibility. He was helped immeasurably, in all of the “Pirates” pictures, by the decorative whimsy of Mark McCreery (the production designer here) and by the uninhibited goofiness of Johnny Depp, who turned Jack Sparrow into a new pop-culture archetype. Both Mr. McCreery and Mr. Depp are crucial to the look and rhythm of “Rango,” keeping it vigorously strange almost until the end, when the movie decides to go for the safe, commercial action-extravaganza wrap-up.

But the craziness of the journey makes that familiar destination worth it. We first encounter Mr. Depp’s character, a domesticated lizard with a Hawaiian shirt and an active imagination, in the terrarium tank he shares with a broken doll torso and a wind-up plastic fish. This minimal world is a stage for him, and he struts about on it like a scaly provincial trouper, acting out dramatic scenarios and scenes from Shakespeare to dispel the boredom of benign captivity. The blank, abstract space this creature inhabits calls our attention to the fanciful nature of the movie itself, as it begins to conjure an antic, improbable world out of nothing.

Or, rather, out of images and ideas that have been floating around in the collective dream life for as long as most of us can remember. Mr. Verbinski and his colleagues (John Logan wrote the script, and James Ward Byrkit shares story credit) rummage through a grab bag of allusions and homages, many of which seem inspired more by genuine fandom than by the impulse to be clever. There is an early, blink-and-you-miss-it nod to the memory of Hunter S. Thompson, who is a personal touchstone for Mr. Depp and is also connected to the iconography of the West that “Rango” sets out to explore. That includes not only the expected tumbleweeds and cactuses and dusty rock formations, but also a hallucinatory desert tradition encompassing Carlos Castaneda and Wile E. Coyote.

Prodded on his quest by a visionary armadillo (voiced by Alfred Molina) and accompanied by the corridos of a quartet of fatalistic singing owls, our reptilian hero drags himself to the desolate town of Dirt, a bleak, bone-dry place that is nonetheless swimming in cinematic associations. As Hans Zimmer’s score chews up great mouthfuls of Ennio Morricone-style spaghetti, the town’s varmint population evokes movies ranging from the westerns of John Ford to “Chinatown” and “The Big Sleep.”

I know, it sounds annoyingly, coyly referential — something like a lizard-cowboy “Shrek” — but the spirit is closer to those old Bugs Bunny cartoons in which Bugs would cross paths with real movie stars or perform Wagnerian opera. In other words, it is not self-conscious knowingness that drives “Rango” but rather a quirky and sincere enthusiasm for all the strange stuff that has piled up in the filmmakers’ heads over the years. Nor are they merely recycling. The desert environment has a washed-out, eerie appearance entirely unlike the plasticized landscapes of most animation — the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, who shot the American West for Joel and Ethan Coen in “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” is credited as a visual consultant — and the critters who inhabit it are arrestingly, grotesquely hairy, slimy and scaly.

In addition to the reptile there are an impressive assortment of birds, bugs, rodents and less identifiable species that collectively enact a story of greed, treachery and bravery as old as the West itself. Our lizard, a stranger in town, takes on the name Rango and finds himself appointed sheriff, and also romantically drawn to a plucky frontier gal named Beans (Isla Fisher). (Abigail Breslin, Ray Winstone and Harry Dean Stanton are among the other notable voices of Dirt.) The town is drying up, and the mayor (Ned Beatty) may not have the best interests of the citizens at heart.

A whole lot happens, culminating in a showdown with a villainous rattlesnake (Bill Nighy) and including a voice cameo that I won’t spoil, though the end credits might. Those interested in narrative coherence may feel a bit let down at the end; I confess I wanted a tighter gathering of loose ends, and a more thorough explanation of the politics of water and real estate in the fast-changing American West.

But that’s what real westerns are about. “Rango,” which may take place entirely within its hero’s head — that kind of ambiguity worked in “Inception” and “Black Swan,” so why not here? — is about the appetite for myths and stories, whether or not they make sense. It is about the worlds we dream inside our fishbowls, helped by the weird reflections on the walls.

“Rango” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). There’s rude talk, smoking and killing. It is a western, after all.

RANGO

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Gore Verbinski; written by John Logan, based on a story by Mr. Logan, Mr. Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit; feature animation by Industrial Light and Magic; edited by Craig Wood; music by Hans Zimmer; production design by Mark McCreery; produced by Mr. Verbinski, Graham King and John B. Carls; released by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Johnny Depp (Rango), Isla Fisher (Beans), Abigail Breslin (Priscilla), Alfred Molina (Roadkill), Bill Nighy (Rattlesnake Jake), Stephen Root (Doc/Merrymack), Harry Dean Stanton (Balthazar), Ray Winstone (Bad Bill), Ned Beatty (Mayor) and Timothy Olyphant (the Spirit of the West).

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