A chameleon lizard named Rango gets lost in the desert while he and his owners are on a road trip. Rango wanders through the desert until he comes across a town. The mayor makes Rango the sheriff after killing a dangerous hawk. The town has a water problem and the last jug of water has been stolen. Rango and some of the town folk go looking for the critters responsible.
Blaine: The idea for “Rango” started in 2003 when two men named John Carls and David Shannon had thought about there being a Western with creatures of the desert. They pitched the idea to Gore Verbinski along with a few sketches. Gore wrote down a couple of pages that had a lizard who loves to pretend and then one day he finds this town where he becomes a sheriff. Then a hired gun comes into town, the lizard is revealed to be a fraud and exiled. The more Gore got into the idea the more he loved it and wanted to direct it. Gore had to put the project on hold for a while because he had signed on to direct the three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Gore and screenwriter John Logan had been looking for something to do together for a while and when Gore decided that it was time to return to the “Rango” project, he thought that John should write the script. John Logan wasn’t interested in doing an animated feature at first, but when Gore told him that it was going to be about a lizard in the desert with a bunch of Western characters it sounded awesome to him and something that would be fun to do.
Gore and a few others watched old classic Westerns like “High Noon”, “Will Penny”, “El Dorado” and “True Grit” in order to figure out how a Western should look as an animated feature. The concept artists did several drawings of desert animals dressed up. Gore and the artists would work on the project at a house with a wide open space. It was fun for everyone to be working on an animated feature there. Drawing designs, doing storyboards and 3D sculptures. It was a place people wanted to go. They spent 16 months working in that house on story reel which is basically the whole movie in pencil sketches with temporary voices.
They took the script and made comic strips so that they could watch it as a movie and judge it and critique it. Gore and James Ward Byrkit, one of the screenwriters and character designers, would do the voices. Gore talked about the “Rango” project to Johnny Depp while they were making one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Gore wanted Johnny to do the voice of Rango because he is a professional character actor and he felt the character was suitable for him. Johnny Depp saw the animatic that Gore and his team made and thought it was really good. James Ward Byrkit did the voice of Rango in that animatic and Johnny asked Gore why he needed him to be Rango because Jim sounded good as the character.
Normally the only thing animated features require from an actor is his or her voice. They have their voices recorded in a sound booth, but for “Rango” all the actors would work together while wearing costumes on a grey set with props. It wasn’t motion capture, it was more about actors having fun by acting goofy and pretending.
After that, Gore went to ILM and showed the visual effects department all of the drawings his team of artists had done. No one at ILM had ever done an animated feature before, but they thought it was an interesting look for one after seeing those drawings. What ILM wanted to do was give the film more of a photographic look, make it look like it was shot in real places.
ILM looked at the drawings of the characters and made three dimensional models on computer. They would do one character at a time. It would take two days to do one character. It took eight months to do Rango on computer because he is the main character and is in almost every single shot. The most challenging thing was his eyes because they are so big and they are not like any eyes you’ve seen before. The lizard skin covers up the whole eye except for the pupil. ILM had to figure out how to add expression on them.
At the beginning of “Rango” you see Raoul Duke, a character Johnny Depp played in another movie, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. Raoul's road body, Dr. Gonzo, is in the back. Rattle Snake Jake was made to be the villain of the movie, but at the end he shows that he has a good side to him. At first he and Rango start off as enemies, but then Rango saves him from being shot to death by the mayor and he is forever grateful to him. It is predictable that the mayor is a bad guy judging by the look in his eyes and the way he talks. The Spirit of West can take any form and to Rango he is Clint Eastwood’s character in “The Man with No Name”. I think the reason why is because Clint Eastwood is an actor and actors like to pretend to be someone else and that’s what Rango loves to do.
