Friday, January 31, 2014

Rango


            Judged simply on its visuals alone, this film gets a solid 10.  Technology has progressed to such a point that these walking-talking anthropomorphic animated animals actually look real.  And the bizarre characters and setting of this film are wonderful.
            With all this, you would expect a story that is equally bizarrely wonderful.  Unfortunately, what you get is a story that is just another conventional children’s movie.
            Still, it’s not entirely unenjoyable.

 Rating:


Link
For my review of Chinatown, see here.  (Much of the plot of Rango is borrowed from Chinatown.)

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - On TomCast  (27-04-2010)

2 comments:

dpreimer said...

Saw this in the theatres, back in the day. The graphics are indeed incredible, but almost revoltingly so. The texture and skin tones, the sheen on the eye-balls took some getting used to.

Then there's the setting. Adult viewers learn to endure a certain degree of cognitive dissonance in kids movies, but this one was off the charts. A pet escapes and learns to live ... in the wild? Nope. In an animal town that's about to be replaced with an animal suburbia -- settings which do not "resemble" the human world, but mirror it without so much as a wink at the conceit. I tend to give John Lasseter a hard time, but he would never have given this concept the green light.

Still, there were lines that got me chuckling, and, "That was a bad idea," had me in stitches.

Joel Swagman said...

You had to give the setting a lot of space, definitely. I kind of liked the visuals of a wild west town populated by anthropomorphic animals--especially since the CGI seemed so incredibly realistic. But then I was disappointed that they didn't really do anything interesting with that setting.