Rango

When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in any recent animated film that comes to mind and laced with a humor that never feels cheap or easy.

From its opening moments, Rango carries a mild sense of Dadaist whimsy, a mariachi band addressing the audience directly and introducing a character "who has yet to enter his own story." Cut to a flower-shirted chameleon going stir-crazy in a terrarium, organizing plays with the plastic objects littering his boxed home and even holding conversations with such props as a wind-up fish and a mock tree. Just as the lizard hits upon a new idea requiring an ironic twist for his protagonist, his masters' car lurches in traffic and sends the terrarium out of the foolishly open back window, stranding the domesticated creature in the middle of a harsh desert highway with a sun so hot a drop of water sizzles and evaporates on the tongue before it can even offer the tease of a quenched thirst. The poor beast shrivels up and partially crumbles twice in the rays.

At this point, the metafictional devices employed with the mariachi band and self-reflexive acting of the protagonist among his props gives way to outright surrealism, from a squashed armadillo carrying on a cryptic conversation with the lizard and sun-baked hallucinations allowing for some truly breathtaking yet hilarious animation. At last, our hero finds his way to a parched town called Dirt where he avoids a swift beating by taking the name Rango and putting his acting chops to the test with fanciful tales of gunslinging prowess.

Amazingly, Rango sidesteps the lazy appropriation of winking clichés seen in recent animated films, even as it eschews putting a toe into the Western genre pool for splashing in with a cannonball. This is the closest anyone has come to making a CGI Tarantino movie. Rango does not simply regurgitate pop culture, it embraces it, honoring conventions even as it pokes fun and adds new dimensions to them. Leone references dominate the landscape, from the use of a Morricone-esque score by Hans Zimmer to a likeness of the Man with No Name. The film also incorporates the work of Chuck Jones in its chaotic yet carefully composed animation, ensuring strict adherence of spatial relationships and perspective so that the sudden breaks are even more clanging, hilarious and daring. Verbinski even throws in a Fear and Loathing nod, recalling not only Hunter's own mad, hallucinogenic ride through the desert but Terry Gilliam, whose influence can be seen all over Rango's visual originality rooted in the work of others.

To even get into how gorgeous, how memorable and how singular the animation of Rango is would send this review down a dead-end street of superlatives. Who on Earth could have guessed from Rango's unalluring teaser that the primary influence on its visual scheme, even above classical Western imagery, would be the work of Salvador Dalí? To be fair, the animators left a hefty clue for the audience in the unimpressive frame of the protagonist. Rango, too weird to appeal in a trailer, works brilliantly in context: set against the startlingly realistic animation of the other animals, Rango visually clashes. His askew, pencil-thin neck supports his vast head like a glacial till holding up a balancing rock, and his slightly uneven eye sockets with narrowed nipples for peepers subtly resemble breasts. Only Rattlesnake Jake, a massive, coiling psychopath who comes to town to pop the bubble of Rango's inflated persona, matches Rango's off-kilter animation, what with his seemingly endless body and his machine-gun rattler.

The backdrops offer even more chances for innovative rendering. Hallucinations of terrifyingly symmetrical cactus configurations, slow-motion shots of a desert highway illuminates overhead by cars passing over the hero, and a transparently fake (and thus disgustingly recognizable) Las Vegas are but some of the masterful background animations in which Verbinski places his characters. Where Wes Anderson's inexperience with animation did not preclude him from dictating style and movement to his supposedly tortured team on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the less-mannered Verbinski appears to have reacted to his own unfamiliarity with the medium with humility, ceding artistic control to his animators. Amazingly, Rango fails to fall into the trap that entangled infamous examples of competing visions in animation (Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland comes swiftly to mind), maintaining a cohesive juxtaposition between surprising realism and the most brazen use of Dada in children's entertainment since the early brilliance of Spongebob Squarepants.

Of course, to say that assumes Rango could conceivably be seen as a kid's film, which it most emphatically is not. Though it sidesteps Tarantino's vulgarity, the sheer amount of adult-oriented pop culture references and film history on display offers nothing for a child, and most of the dialogue plays at, at the least, a teenage level. Only the slapstick could fully appeal to a child, but then physical comedy, when done well, is universal, and the comedy here is dynamite. And if the sophistication of the writing does not turn off the children, the sight of Rattlesnake Jake surely will, each lunge of his bared fangs or constricting coil around heroes terrifying enough to shake an adult. Those dismissing Rango for not being palatable to children (or praising it in spite of this "shortcoming") have grown too accustomed to the idea of animation being something that must appeal to children. Rango has just enough to keep a kid entertained -- and for the love of God, parents, let your kids get scared; it does 'em good -- but it clearly aims for an older audience.

Part of Rango's promotional package highlighted Verbinski's staging of the voice cast as if they were actually on-screen, filming them acting together in what seemed a desperate gimmick. Yet the move paid off, and Rango sports one of the voice casts of major stars to sound as if the actors did more than simply speak into the microphone. Bill Nighy properly sinks into his role as Jake, adding menace to his speech and not just his movement. An unrecognizable Isla Fisher plays Beans, the unfortunately named love interest who chatters in a contradictory mile-a-minute drawl shockingly familiar to those of us who have heard the slowed-down Southern accent as sped up by inflamed passions. And what a weird niche in which Ned Beatty has found himself, playing a crippled authority figure exuding false comfort and harboring ulterior motives in an animated film only a year after....well, you know.

Casting Rango, a delusional pet with aspirations of being a thespian, as a chameleon was a sly gag, and one Johnny Depp undoubtedly got. After the last two Pirates movies, the relationship between Depp and Verbinski went stale, to the point one could not easily recall how incandescent their first pairing was (and on a film preemptively dismissed as derivative and money-grabbing). They capture lightning in a bottle once more here, letting Depp exercise his most exuberant techniques without the setbacks of watching the actual man contort himself into buffoonish shapes for a laugh. Never appearing on-screen, Depp hasn't been so watchable in years.

Stuffed with allusions and surprises, Rango occasionally goes so far as to recontextualize its references and make something else out of them. A massive canyon chase not only combines elements of the podcast race and Death Star trench run of Episodes I and IV, respectively, it also adds a dash of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, albeit with bats. Three superb sequences combine into one visual tour-de-force that borrows the best aspects from all of them and plays around in the white space left over. At the other end of the spectrum, the film pokes fun at the stereotypes of Native Americans, the somber raven to whom Rango incessantly condescends always subverting expectations based on genre clichés (a reference to Depp's involvement in the thoroughly anti-cliché, anti-Western Dead Man, perhaps?). I also enjoyed the idea of a town so literally dry that, when the locals laugh at the naïve city slicker asking for water, they do so because they'd all love nothing more than a sip of the stuff instead of alcohol.

In a year where Pixar already seems to be planning a working vacation with Cars 2, Rango might survive in the public consciousness through the year and win some accolades come the next awards season. One can only hope; Rango is one of the few animated films to ignore Pixar entirely, either as competition or influence. The makers focused only on telling a good story in the way they saw it, and the results freely leap off the screen despite staying in obsolete ol' 2D. Intelligent, witty, original films of any stripe do not come along often, and to see something this bold come from the seemingly dessicated corpse of Nickelodeon Studios proves one should never count anyone out. The film circles around the idea that anyone can be a hero given the right circumstances and sense of perseverance and duty; Rango itself proves how dedication turns a decent concept into great art.

Toy Story 3

About a month ago, I received an email from a reporter for RTE, Irish national radio, asking -- to my complete surprise -- for an interview related to the upcoming release of Toy Story 3*. Pat McGrath, a terribly nice man who put up with far too much of my nerdy rambling, read my reviews of the first two films of the series and liked them sufficiently to ask for my thoughts about the series and Pixar as a whole.

Now, I kept myself as in-the-dark as I possibly could for Toy Story 3, as I do for any film that catches my interest, so Pat caught me off-guard during the interview when he mentioned that the premise of Toy Story 3, about a college-bound teen leaving behind his toys, effectively targeted the film at my generation, specifically those who got to see the first movie as children in a theater -- I was 6 when I saw it -- and now find ourselves off to college. Because I tried not to let any unfair expectations build in my mind, I had not previously thought about this, and suddenly I felt excitement for the film that matched any of the art films I knew wouldn't come to my neck of the woods. For the first time since leaving childhood, I was in exactly the right age group to see an animated film. (This is also why, in the interview, you can hear me stumble when talking about this, to the point that I use the word "interesting" three times in less than 30 seconds because, damn it, I was very interested suddenly.)

After I sat down in the theater, however, I quickly realized that, as much as Toy Story 3 might be aimed at my generation, it must still play for the one that came after us. An understandable decision, to be sure, as mainstream American audiences still will not see an animated film as anything other than kiddie fare, and if Pixar has a tragic flaw, it is that they choose not to break through this ceiling despite bumping against it so often the glass must be one good shove from shattering at this point. Director Lee Unkrich, a longtime Pixar employee given his first big shot, clearly wants to do well by the series -- and, by extension of the first Toy Story's significance, the entire Pixar studio -- so he attempts to juggle the history of the franchise and the studio while still making a fresh story to appeal to younger children who may well be coming to Toy Story 3 to see their first Pixar movie.

Somehow, he pulls it off. Toy Story 3 deals in nostalgia, which is only natural because its characters are toys, which are rapidly becoming obsolete. With Andy all grown up and headed for college, the few remaining toys in his care find themselves awaiting an uncertain future bound either for the attic or the garbage can. Even Molly, now a tween still young enough to get away with playing with toys, has no interest in them, absorbed with her iPod and concerned only with taking over her brother's room and swiping whatever electronics he does not take with him. With only the slightest suggestion, Unkrich plants the idea into the mind of even a 20-year-old that "kids today" don't know the joy of tossing around some tacky plastic spacemen and cowgirls in your own imagined universe. For proof of this, one need only look at the opening sequence, a brilliant combination of the openings of the first two movies, in which Andy's playtime receives the grand, imaginative visualization that opened the second film (which incidentally presaged the modern mindset by replacing Andy's imagination with a video game). A child can envision a scenario more fantastically out-there than even the most sandbox-oriented video game can accommodate, and the first major heartbreak of Toy Story 3 is the presentation of this delightful use of free time in the flashbacks of home videos, as if capturing something that one day becomes just a memory and not a way of looking at the world.

If I might discuss Toy Story 3 in personal terms -- and, frankly, I can see no other way for someone my age to discuss it -- this opening sequence did not quite tug at my heartstrings, but it did something far more satisfactory: it put me in an oddly serene mood, a wistful reminder not simply of a happier time but an entire perspective that I lost. Watching Andy spin the same basic "story" of his playtime in the first film into an epic space Western, I remembered mashing up my own disparate types of toys into imagined wars for the soul of the galaxy, with Star Wars characters inexplicably fighting Army men and even the odd shark. To think that kids might lose that feeling made me want to leap to my feet in the theater and risk extreme incarceration by shaking the young children in attendance and screaming something largely unhelpful like "Don't you get it?!" before the hot sting of a taser hit my back.

Part of the appeal of the first two movies was the retro style of the toys, culled from the Pixar team's own childhood favorites, but now the age of the toys is just further proof of how outdated the very idea of toys is. These days, a toy like Buzz Lightyear, which looked so cool back in 1995 to my wide, 6-year-old eyes, might as well sit next to the ball-in-a-cup. When Molly's Barbie turns up with Andy's toys, she wears leg warmers and sports '80s hair, and the hollow reflection of chauvinist perception of the ideal woman now seems a hollow reflection of itself. Everything ages, including Andy's formerly manic dog, Buster, but the toys remain forever, sitting neglected in a toy box as Andy outgrows them. Over time, Andy and Molly dispose of all but the most beloved toys, and when someone mentions that Woody's belle, Bo Peep, got thrown out long ago, that brief moment creates a sudden gulf of sadness.

Thus, it comes as no wonder that, when the toys inadvertently find themselves at a daycare center instead of in the attic where Andy relegated all of them but Woody, they find the prospect of being played with for all eternity overwhelming: when the current crop of kids grows older, they are replaced by the next wave of tykes to lavish love upon them. (Toys would love Menudo.) It's certainly preferable to stealing Andy's cell phone and making it ring near them just so the boy will look at them. Upon their arrival, Woody, Buzz and the gang meet all the other donated toys, headed by Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear (Losto for short), a cuddly stuffed bear who serves as the Virgil for the new arrival.

Speaking of Virgil, what's most interesting about the setup of Sunnyside Daycare is how Unkrich expands upon the existentialism of Toy Story 2 by making the third installment into a plastic version of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Initially, the escape from the purgatory of Andy's dusty toy box must seem like Heaven, but, when the bell rings and a sea of toddlers burst in to play, the toys realize they've been sent to Hell, trapped in a room with too-young toddlers. Instantly, we see that Lotso isn't as friendly as he lets on and, like the planes of afterlife in Dante's epic, Heaven and Hell can exist right next to each other, a locked door separating the nightmarish den of two-year-olds from the older children who will really play with toys instead of destroy them.

Soon, Toy Story 3 morphs into a prison escape film, an odd choice but one that lends itself to a number of clever gags. Woody's first attempted escape starts on a triumphant, defiant note and ends with a high comic anticlimax, while the "caging" of Andy's toys recalls a number of classic prison films like Cool Hand Luke and The Great Escape. Most inspired in the breakout is the "Mr. Tortilla Head" bit, a gag that comes out of left field and wins the biggest laugh of the film. Unfortunately, in a film bookended by beautiful ruminations on the nature of aging (and, for toys, horrible agelessness), this angle takes away from some of the emotional depth that the film offers, falling into the trap of cultural references that only briefly entangled Toy Story 2, made more noticeable here by how unrecognizable the references to prison movies will be for children and even most teenagers.

However, every Pixar film builds aesthetically off what came before, and if the prison escape plot distracts from the greater resonance of Toy Story 3, Unkrich nevertheless uses the storyline to exhibit the same sweeping visual advancements displayed on the epic canvasses of Ratatouille and Wall•E into a confined space and doesn't lose an ounce of technical mastery. Lotso is animated with over a million individual thread hairs, allowing his bright purple fur to mingle with a hint of dirt and water damage, hinting at his true character and his backstory long before we see how his own past turned him into a bitter villain (a story that plays as a dark foil to Jessie's own heartbreaking tale from the last film). A cheeky, recurring bit involving Mrs. Potato Head's missing eye allows Unkrich to occasionally peek back at Andy's house without breaking the narrative, and the occasional overlap of what Mrs. Potato Head can see in Sunnyside and what her eye catches back home create shimmering mirages that only enhance the feeling of Sunnyside as a hell that mocks the toys' desires to be played with and to see their owner again.

With limited locations, Unkrich creates a number of unique setpieces using nothing more than inventive exploration and skillful lighting, such as the sickly, neon yellow-green of the interior of a vending machine where all the rulers of the Sunnyside toys meet. Lighting is actually the key component of Toy Story 3: after experimenting heavily with animated reflection with Cars and overwhelming the eyeballs with Wall•E, the Pixar animators shrink the scope from Paris and outer space to a daycare center, yet the lighting is possibly the studio's most memorable. The daycare's default lighting is hazy and oppressive, rather like the same alternately foggy and revealing light Steven Spielberg used in E.T. Toy Story 3 makes the audience feel like these toys are really in a prison, muggy and bleak. All Unkrich needs to do is alter that setup, switching out the stifling mix of sunlight and fluorescent bulbs with the harsh, blinding white of an interrogation lamp or sinister glows to completely change the way you look at the same setpiece. And there has never been a more terrifying moment in all of Pixar's history than the sight of a raging incinerator at the end, belching flames that have actually been animated to be too bright to look at for an extended period of time.

So, the film may be too long by about 10 minutes, which could have been rectified by either cutting out some of the waffle in the middle or teasing out the truth of Sunnyside for a few minutes instead of immediately revealing its dark side. Also, the middle bit, in contrast to the point made by the opening sequence in relation to the imagination, does too much of the piloting rather than let the audience connect fully the way they do at the start and the finish.

However, these minor tremors cannot derail the copious pleasures of Toy Story 3, and writing them down shows me how well the film manages to address and fix its mistakes. Unkrich inserts numerous callbacks to previous Pixar films (and even what appears to be a toy based on Miyazaki Hayao's masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro), yet he never allows the film to get stuck into the rote of these sequels, serving only to remind the audience of the better films that came before. These are but minor touches in a narrative that expands upon the ideas of the first two: if Toy Story 2 posited the idea of toy (im)mortality and existentialism, Unkrich shows a toy losing its soul, when Lotso has Buzz's programming reset. As much as I suspect that the Pixar team cleared out so many of Andy's toys to allow for easier processing of all the new characters, the loss of so many old characters is logical, appropriate and heartfelt. Besides, the additions are more interesting than many of the original toys who would have outstayed their usefulness and appeal otherwise, such as a group of toys in the home of a sweet, imaginative girl named Bonnie; they take to their roles as if being a toy is an actual occupation, spouting out hilarious lines like "We do a lot of improv" and "Are you classically trained?"

But it all comes back to the central idea of the second film, the question of a toy's life when no one plays with it. When Andy surveys his remaining toys while packing for college, he dismisses his mother's assertion that he should donate them by calling the remnants of his childhood "junk." Unkrich then holds on the faces of the toys, unable to move in front of him, forced to absorb this cruelty with flinching, the frozen plastic eyes more heartbreaking than tears could ever be. Keeping that in mind, who can really blame Lotso for thinking, "We're all just trash waiting to be thrown away"? Toy Story 3 does not settle for simply giving us all our old pals to laugh with: it builds off what came before and reminds us what we leave behind when we mature. And then, somehow, it turns its heartbreaking final scene -- the most touching in Pixar's oeuvre -- into as hopeful and delicate a finale even as it sets off yet another iteration of the same cycle that lead the characters to this point. It may not match the heights of Toy Story 2, nor some of the studio's recent marvels, but Toy Story 3 may be the single best piece of evidence that there are people in this world who know exactly what it means to grow older without losing a sense of wonder, and they all seem to work for the same company.



*For anyone interested, the Toy Story segment Mr. McGrath for which interviewed me can be found on the page of Morning Ireland's broadcast from June 14 here. I rambled about all things Disney/Pixar/animation for about 20 minutes, about a minute of which survives in the final edit. It's almost certainly for the better, given how out-there I got with some of my material, but the idea that my slurred, half-suppressed Southern drawl can be heard for any length of time next to audio of John Lasseter on a bona fide radio broadcast is about as cool as it gets for a geek. Note: RTE's player requires either Windows Media Player or Real Player to run.

Deliverance

When I was around 11 years old, I watched Deliverance for the first time. My family was always making references to lines like "squeal like a pig" and "you sure do got a purty mouth" as well as twanging out a banjo lick whenever we took a trip up to North Georgia (incidentally the setting and shooting location of the film). I was curious, so I managed to slip in a copy in our Blockbuster haul one day unnoticed. God, what a mistake.

As I watched the doomed canoeing excursion of four Atlanta boys paddling down a river before the construction of a new dam destroyed it forever, I was enraptured, not in interest or analysis but horror. Granted, it was my fault that I watched this movie at too young an age, but my word it did a number on me. I've never used the "squeal like a pig" line since, though I admit I still hum "Dueling Banjos" when the time calls for it. The experience shook me so thoroughly that I've never watched the film again, even when I felt I was old enough to take it, until today when my film professor played it. While I still felt pangs of fear, I quickly learned that not only was I old enough to properly handle the film -- and it barely affected me this time around, of course -- but I could also see it for what it is: a Vietnam movie.

Upon the film's release in 1972, America was on the verge of a full troop removal in Vietnam and films about the war were still anathema and box office poison. Not until the end of the decade did major films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now get releases, and it took nearly an additional decade for the next wave (Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, Platoon) arrive. Ergo, director John Boorman and writer James Dickey (adapting his own novel) substituted the jungle with the forest, and Vietnamese peasants with hillfolk farmers.

Into this world come four city boys: Lewis (Burt Reynolds), the man's man who organizes the trip ostensibly to get in touch with nature; Ed (Jon Voight), who looks up to Lewis; Drew (Ronny Cox), the friendliest member of the group; and Bobby (Ned Beatty), an insurance salesman with the least ties to the others. In an opening voiceover, Lewis vehemently argues for the trip, as the dam will "rape this land." He expresses a hatred for the construction company for threatening to destroy the beauty of the land and of forcing the inhabitants in the valley that will become a lake when the river is diverted. Yet he and the others express a disdain for the locals from the start; Bobby in particular openly mocks a gas station attendant while Lewis condescends to the men he pays to drive their cars down to the mouth of the river. Only Drew is polite and affable with the natives, even playing that now-legendary tune with a talented inbred boy.

As their journey down the river unfolds, we see the Vietnam metaphor expand. This group of white men have brought their ideals and beliefs into a world so near yet so alien to them, and they mock, demean and attack these natives for their perceived inferiority. Slowly, they begin to fill soldier archetypes: Bobby is the slightly craven but vocally outspoken one, the type who walks around 'Nam, or France, or the islands of the Pacific espousing his low opinions of his surroundings. Eventually that abrasiveness costs him dearly, in that infamous scene.

Bobby's rape, diluted substantially through nearly four decades' worth of parody, nevertheless retains its visceral weight. A number of my classmates mentioned that their fathers (no moms were mentioned) thought the film was hilarious, though I was relieved that these students all expressed a disbelief in their parents' opinions once it was finished. Two filthy, toothless hillbillies approach Ed and Bobby from out of the woods when the pair stops on the river bank for a rest, demanding to know what they're doing there. Bobby, always so scathing, realizes that they're wandering into danger and tries to diffuse the situation, but he only makes it worse when he stammers out a reference to the men possibly wanting to protect a moonshine still. Suddenly, enraged, the men trap Ed and Bobby and violate the latter while we see (and mainly hear) the actions from Ed's point of view. When Lewis comes to the rescue and murders Bobby's rapist, the rest slip into their roles fully.

The men agree to bury the affair (literally), and only Drew objects. Playing the role of the idealistic young private reminiscent of the Michael J. Fox character in Casualties of War or the Charlie Sheen character in Platoon, Drew believes that they must report Bobby's assault and their murder, rightly citing it as justifiable homicide. But Lewis brings up going to a trail by jury in this town of close-knit farmers, while Bobby pleads with them, "I don't want this getting around." So, they bury the attacker and attempt to make it to the end of the rapids.

Soon after they depart, however, Drew suddenly tumbles out of the canoe, and Lewis immediately shouts that he's been shot. The survivors barely make it through a set of rapids and find themselves trapped by the supposed shooter. Lewis is incapacitated with a compound fracture, so Ed must climb the cliff to dispatch the attacker. Earlier in the film, Ed attempted to shoot a deer with his bow and arrow but he couldn't bring himself to do it, and he has a similar problem when he spots a shooter overlooking their tipped canoe. The macho posturing giving way to an inability to kill is a standard trope of war films, but it's the implication of Ed's murder that draws the biggest parallels to Vietnam.

He climbed the rock face to exact revenge for his dead friend and presumed that this man was the same who helped the rapist corner him and Bobby, yet the man he kills has teeth, unlike the second rapist. This is a clear microcosm of so many "reprisals" targeting innocent Vietnamese villages, most notoriously the My Lai Massacre. His doubt only exacerbates his feelings of guilt and revulsion at taking a life.

Eventually, the three surviving pals make it to shore, agree upon a story to sell the cops and head to the hospital. The local sheriff knows something is up and that the story doesn't check out, but he has nothing to charge them with, so he reluctantly lets them go. While Lewis remains behind to continue recuperating -- and even possibly lose his leg -- Ed and Bobby bid farewell. As a goodbye, Bobby merely tells Ed, "I don't think I'll be seeing you anytime soon," a final acknowledgment of their agreement never to speak of what happened.

The journey down the Georgia river, in retrospect, calls to mind Capt. Willard's trip upstream in Apocalypse Now: in that film, Willard knew he was heading into danger, while these men assumed they were just going to have some fun. Where Willard had the option of turning around, these four had to keep going until they emerged (hopefully) alive. Also, that shot of a hand rising from the river is an obvious nod to horror pictures, but it also made me think of Willard rising from the lake to confront Kurtz. Deliverance is not a perfect film; it tries to cram a lot into a modest length and occasionally some stuff just won't fit nicely. However, it's a fascinating allegory for the Vietnam conflict and indeed for the American mindset of all our subsequent conflicts.