Just as Glitter leaves children alone once they’ve grown up, so to do most children leave behind animation, which would beg the question did I ever grow up because I still like watching cartoons . Granted there’s a lot of things I used to enjoy as a child that having seen them again in adulthood don’t stand up anymore, but then there are others that still do, generally it’s the programmes that had higher production values or more adult themes, like Transformers, Thundercats or Ulysses 31. If something is genuinely good to start with, it will always be so, even if it may seem dated by today’s standards.
As I’ve gotten older my taste for animation has developed as enjoying the world of anime, not that I would call myself a true anime fan, in my experience the true believes seem to like anything that falls under that banner, but given that the Japanese don’t really separate animation from live action, with a good third of their entire television and film output is animated, covering all subject matter and age certification, saying you like anime is like saying you like the BBC.
So we’ve established I like animation, but since this is a film blog, I should try and steer this rudderless boat down the right river. I tend to watch most animated film, be they from Disney or DreamWorks, Pixar to Studio Ghilbi. The thing all the major producers have is their own style, when you watch a Disney movie you know your watching a Disney movie, a fact which makes any new kids on the block tend to stand out, even more so when their a one off, made by an already established filmmaker, like Wes Anderson with Fantastic Mr Fox or Gore Verbinski with Rango.
Gore Verbinski’s biggest films to date have been the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but these films nor anything else from his back catalogue point towards animation, the closest is maybe the cartoon like family comedy Mouse Hunt, but that was live action.
It is perhaps this lack of experience in the field that lead Verbinski to make the film in a very different way to your average studio animation. That’s not to say it didn’t have studio backing, it did, just not from the usual big hitters. The studio in question, Nickelodeon, who have produced animations in the past, mainly big screen versions of their TV channel mainstays, such as Rugrats and SpongeBob. They've also produced a number of family friendly live action movies like The Spiderwick Chronicles and Nacho Libre. But last year they brought out the big guns, the now Oscar winning Rango and The Adventures of TinTin: Secret of the Unicorn, which won the Golden Globe for best animated film, the first non-Pixar film to do so since the category was introduced. Basically if 2011 is anything to go by Pixar have some non-DreamWorks competition, but then Pixar’s 2011 contribution was Cars 2, one of the worst films they’ve ever made.
Back to Rango, and how it could have changed the way animated films are made. At the early stages of development Verbinski assembled a group of artists and writers together, not all of whom are from the celluloid world, and tasked his collective with coming up with the story and the conceptual art for the characters. The four artists involved would go off and work on charters, come together, compare notes, steal ideas, go back to the drawing board, then convene again, repeating until each design was complete.
That was the first thing Verbinski did differently, the second was assemble his cast, which may not sound revolutionary, even sound pretty standard. But what happens usually in animation, the voice actors come in one by one, record their vocal track in a little booth all alone, then they go home, they may not even come into contact with the other cast members until the premiere, if at all. With Rango Verbinski took a different track. Johnny Depp (who voices Rango) had a couple of weeks where he was available to record, so Verbinski gathered together all the other actors, including Ned Beatty, Bill Nighy, Ray Winston & Isla Fisher together, and rather than record their dialogue alone, they played dress up (apparently to help them get into character) and acted out the scenes together, allowing them to react to each other as they would in any other film.
Thirdly Verbinski convinced ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) to animate the film, ILM who are a special effects house, and have never made an animated film before (that’s of course if you discount the Pixar connection, but if you want to know more about that find my blog entry entitled ‘Birthing the Giant’ where that connection has previously been explained, we’ll be here all day else)
All these elements together create a unique animated film, a classic western populated by desert creatures, a plot hijacked from Jack Nicholson classic Chinatown, and a stars wars style trench battle with bats. It has a look and feel all of its own, it’s not full of bright colours like you’d find in something like Toy Story, nor child friendly cute and cuddly characters like Madagascar. It’s not a story of race cars rediscovering themselves (I think that sentence sums up how shit Cars is), nor is it a story about nomadic prehistoric creatures returning a child, or anything quite as innocent. It’s a story about a man (or Chameleon in this case) who has no identity of his own, a dreamer who becomes a hero to a town being choked to death by corrupt officials and thugs, about the march of progress regardless of whoever stands in the way, it’s about community, it’s about hope.
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