The previews would have kept me away from Rango but the many rapturous reviews brought me in to see it. Really, a pretty amazing accomplishment. Obviously a lot of critics were won over by the many, many references to other films – which I feel went a bit far and began interfering with my involvement in the movie I was actually watching. Being based to such a great degree on Chinatown probably elevated it in many of those critics eyes as well but, since I don’t really care for Chinatown, while I could appreciate the references, I wished that, if the filmmakers needed to copy a classic film, they had copied a one I like. The performances were uniformly great and the animation, not of the flashy “look what we can do” sort, was truly amazing, especially when I attended to all of the near photographically real elements at play.

ILM will have a tough time topping this with their second animated film whatever it is.