Rango beginning

Current Westerns continue to draw on the drive for resources that is at the center of many earlier western films. A truly American film genre, the Western is regaining its status. The popular and critical success of the True Grit (2010) remake demonstrates the resurgence of this genre that builds on Americans’ hunger for their history and the promise of progress provided there. Although the narrative of True Grit focuses primarily on a revenge plot, it also highlights both a savage landscape that invites the “taming” civilization can provide and, in the characters of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), illustrates the pioneer spirits necessary to settle a Wild West.

Rango (2011), however, most deliberately addresses environmental issues as it both elucidates the environmental history surrounding water rights in the American desert and critiques current water rights practices in the Las Vegas area. In an obvious homage to Chinatown noted by critics from Time Magazine to Salon.Com, Rango explores a hero’s attempts to “save a parched Old West-style town from the depredations of water barons and developers” (O’Hehir “Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation”). With help from a variety of anthropomorphized western characters, Rango (Johnny Depp) successfully returns water to the desert, defeating the water baron mayor (Ned Beatty) and rehabilitating his henchman, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy).

Rango illustrates the continuing influence of the western genre and its environmental underpinnings. The film’s historical narrative, however, is also connected with the contemporary world Rango seems to leave behind when he is thrown out of his human family’s car because the mayor seeks to recreate a desert paradise similar to Las Vegas and its surrounding golf courses, a connection that reinforces the enduring effects of both the western genre and the environmental history that grounds it. By both integrating innovative CGI and animation techniques from Industrial Light and Magic and translating the film’s narrative to a videogame format, Rango  also  effectively demonstrates the ongoing effects of the Desert Land Act and the exploitation of water rights it sometimes encouraged.