RANGO

You've got to give credit to a splendid animated movie that makes adults cackle more than kids, is more than a little weird, and is enormously entertaining.

Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp) is just a lonely lizard, with a lonely life, making up lonely one-sided stories starring his inanimate best friends (a plastic fish, a headless Barbie-doll torso) in the lizard-quarium that is his world. But suddenly his world literally shatters, and he finds himself on the side of a desert highway in a strange new world.

Following the tried-and-true formulas of not only Westerns (which are referenced left and right), but also classic road movies and other Hollywood hits, our hero lizard encounters a variety of strange and unusual characters that point him in the direction of the town of Dirt. Dirt is a classic Old West with a trail of dead sherriffs, and friendly yet suspicious mayor (the turtle Ned Beatty), and a variety of goofy locals (in all sorts of reptile, amphibian, and vermin shapes and sizes). This is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but with a bit of tall-tale storytelling, Rango soon is regarded as a heroic stranger. But Dirt has a problem... a big problem. There is no water. Even vermin need water, so Rango vows to help the townsfolk figure out where the water is going.

What follows is a comic adventure that in all honesty might be more humorous for adults than kids (the script and humor style is fabulously strange, and there are clever references left and right). Johnny Depp is, of course, great as our gawky lizard hero, and the other voices are done so well that you struggle to separate them from the characters. Standouts include Bill Nighy as the scary bad guy Rattlesnake Jake and Alfred Molina as a flattened armadillo. There are also great action sequences that more than a little mirror anything from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Star Wars to even Lord of the Rings.

For all the fun of the story (which is where so many movies these days, animated or not, fall short), one notable thing about Rango is that the animation is absolutely fantastic. These crazy, bug-eyed, exaggerated characters are wonderfully portrayed, and are so realistic that you immediately slip into their world. For a movie that emphasizes the importance of water, you never feel like the animators are showing off their CGI skills gratuitously, like, "Look how real this splash of water looks! Look at it!" The look of the film is so seamless and perfect, from dry riverbeds to lizard skin to gushes of H2O, that you could easily believe this alternate world of talking critters could exist down the road. It's nothing but good fun entertainment.