The Big Picture
- Animated Westerns have been few and far between, with most films only using the genre for parodies and aesthetic inspiration.
- Rango stands out as a true Western in animation, exploring the genre's themes and conventions while also deconstructing its heroic archetype.
- The film challenges the idea that one needs to fully embody the traditional image of a hero to become one, emphasizing the importance of community and one's role in it.
Since the medium of animation has been primarily dominated by family comedies, fairy tale fantasies, and poppy musicals for most of its history, animated Westerns have been few and far between, especially in recent years. While films like Disney’s Home on the Range, DreamWorks’ Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Steven Spielberg’s An American Tail: Fievel Goes West use the genre as a source for parodies and aesthetic inspiration, seldom has there been an animated Western true to the genre’s themes and conventional tropes. Shows like Samurai Jack and Avatar: The Last Airbender have also explored the thematic and archetypal elements found in classic American Westerns, but have done so in ways so far aesthetically detached from the traditional Western genre to the point that they are almost unrecognizable. While the Western has been largely absent from blockbuster cinema in general over the past decade, director Gore Verbinski took two shots at the genre with his explosively bombastic Disney reimagining of The Lone Ranger and his animated collaboration with Nickelodeon Movies, Rango.
Both The Lone Ranger and Rango tried to modernize the blockbuster appeal of the Western. While The Lone Ranger was an off-the-wall action adventure in the derivative style of the wildly popular Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, though, the animated Rango stood firm with the truest grit as a Western that explored the genre in ways only possible in animation. Rango, which would go on to win the 2012 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, greatly succeeds as a post-modern deconstruction of the Western genre’s heroic archetype while also championing its tried-and-true conventions.
What Is 'Rango' About?
Released in theaters in 2011, Rango is a surrealist odyssey that employs Western genre savvy and bizarre imagery to tell a story as old as the West itself with a modern sense of self-awareness. The film stars Johnny Depp as a nameless pet chameleon who winds up lost in the middle of the Nevada desert and is set on a journey for water and identity by a mysterious armadillo wanderer played by Alfred Molina. The domesticated chameleon ironically has trouble blending in with the oppressively grimy and grotesque Wild West environment at first, juxtaposed against the reptile’s sterile and clean habitat.
Due to his lifetime of isolation as a suburban house pet, the thespian reptile’s only identity is that of the characters he portrays in his imagination and the world he creates for himself on the stage. When thrust into the harsh world of the Wild West, the chameleon adopts the persona of Rango, a quintessential Western hero poised to save the town of Dirt from villains, thieves, and aquatic poverty. Despite living his entire life in a lonely aquarium tank, the newfound identity of Rango thrives in the role of hero and fully dedicates himself to being the protector of the Wild West, even when outed as a fraud.
How Does 'Rango' Subvert Western Clichés?
On paper, Rango as a script sounds like a standard fish-out-of-water/liar-reveal story arc that many modern animated comedies of the 2000s have done to death. Films like Chicken Run and A Bug’s Life built their third act dramatic tension by having a lie or misunderstanding on the main character’s part be revealed, causing them to be shunned and outcasted by the ones who believed them. Films like these use this revelation as a way to artificially create conflict in the third act, but Rango employs this relief of tension as well but does so in service of the character’s own arc and the film’s perspective of what makes a Western genre hero.
Rango’s election to pass as a performative Western hero was done not out of convenience for his own survival or contrived misunderstanding, but because he was starved for an identity to call his own. From the beginning, the chameleon had no firm sense of who he was or what he wanted, but adopting the role of the classic Western hero and the agency it gave him allowed him the chance to finally have an identity. The film shows what allures the chameleon to the role of hero and what it gives him internally, friends, purpose, and adventure. Once he is discovered as being a liar and his newfound identity shaken, he learns from a vision of Clint Eastwood, himself a literal actor who made a career of playing Western heroes, that being a hero is not about what it gives him, but what it gives to others. The reason Rango becomes a hero and stays one demonstrates the film’s stance on heroism.
Before superheroes dominated the big screen, the most prominent hero archetype in popular media was the cowboy. The rugged image of the wandering individualist aboard his faithful steed and armed with his trusty rifle as he defended the weak from injustice and captured the imagination of the 20th century in media such as films like Shane, True Grit, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Whether he be an outlaw or a noble hero, the cowboy had his place in history as the idealistic symbol of manhood and freedom. Where Rango comes into the picture is in how it challenges the validity and necessity of the traditional hero and that one does not need to fully represent the image of one in order to become one.
Which John Ford Western Does Gore Verbinski Borrow From for 'Rango'?
Rango shares its approach to dismantling hero roles and their place in modern myth with the 1962 John Ford film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. The film stars Jimmy Stewart as a city-slicker senator who seeks to instill order in a lawless town but finds that the only effective response to the threat of a murderous gunslinger is another gunslinger in the form of John Wayne. Despite trying his way to fit into the Wild West town and resisting to meet might with might, the town grants Stewart’s character hero status after believing he shot down the villainous Liberty Valence (Lee Marvin), even though Wayne is the one who pulled the trigger. Despite being the quintessential hero archetype, Wayne’s character knew that the kind of hero Stewart was trying to be was what his community needed, giving him credit in secret. The film’s final moments reveal that the perception of Stewart as being the hero outweighed the reality of what happened or who he was before.
When visited by a vision of Eastwood as “the spirit of the west”, Rango learns that how he is perceived by the town and by himself is irrelevant to what he must do as their hero. He is told that “no man can walk out on his own story”, meaning that what he believes he is capable of or who he views himself to be are secondary to what he knows he must do to protect his friends and fulfill his role as their hero. Rango and Liberty Valence rob the prestige of being a Western hero away from the idealized image of the cowboy and grant it to whoever is willing to be the hero, regardless of who or what they are.
Westerns in animation typically come in the form of genre parodies or broad tonal inspiration, but Gore Verbinski’s Rango succeeds as the greatest animated Western for how much it knew to tackle the ideals of heroism. The film goes beyond calling itself a Western solely for setting itself in a desert town with gunslinging action and wide-open prairies but actively examines if there is a place for classic Western heroes in a modern world. Through imaginative and tangibly believable animation and a full-hearted approach to the bedrock of the genre’s mythos, Rango is a Western tale that trades in idealized heroic iconography with awareness of how participating in community shapes one’s identity, making them a hero.
