“Another thing drove the development of “Rango”: fear. [Gore] Verbinski and his team were terrified of making another, typical animated movie, one with smooth lines and precise handling like some luxury sedan. “What was driving everything was a great fear of iteration equals homogenization once you pass the threshold of rewriting and improving something,” Verbinski said. “Animation is so born of iteration, just thousands of iterations, and it was something that was a mantra – let’s cherish and preserve the awkward moment wherever it exists.” To that end Verbinski came up with a unique idea of how to frame the animation in an effort to strive for imperfection: “We wanted to maintain the sense that there’s a lizard and a tortoise and there’s a guy in the room and we’re photographing it. And maybe we’re using take one from this shot and take six of that shot and maybe the focus was a little late and there’s a bump in the camera move and the audio track doesn’t match perfectly.” Verbinski looked at it like,”What if Hal Ashby was there directing the lizard and the tortoise and they were 6-feet tall? They would try stuff and things would happen and it would evolve.”

Of course wanting things like camera bumps and audio glitches is something that making a movie inside a computer fights against. “The computer lends itself to perfection so easily, we were fabricating flaws and film grain and lens flair and flaws in performance and holding on a take a little longer, just to make it feel like it’s occurring,” Verbinski said. “Nothing’s occurring in animation – you manufacture everything. So we were trying to make it feel like it was happening and we were catching it while it’s happening. We try to stitch in so much anomaly and throw detail at it that it becomes sentient and alive.” It’s an intriguing concept and adds much to the handmade quality of “Rango,” the fact that it feels authorial even though it was assembled by a vast team of talented artists, filmmakers and technicians.”

- Gore Verbinski’s inspirations for Rango