15 years later, the director of Rango looks back: 'We didn't know how to make an animated movie'

Gore Verbinski broke all the rules in his first (and only) foray into animation Rango still stands alone. Beginning as an independent venture from Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy director Gore Verbinski, the animated western was rejected by several studios before being brought to life, not by Pixar or another well-established animation studio, but by special effects house Industrial Light and Magic as its first fully animated film. To date, the movie remains Verbinski’s only animated feature, and even more impressively, there’s still nothing else like its dusty Western aesthetic populated by wonky, wacky anthropomorphic animals. Rango tells the story of a pet chameleon who gets stranded in the desert. He soon finds a small town called “Dirt,” which looks like something out of the old west. To fit in, Rango pretends to be an accomplished gunslinger. When he half-accidentally kills a hawk that’s terrorizing the townsfolk, he’s suddenly anointed as sheriff. But when Dirt’s entire water supply is stolen, Rango has to step up and find out who is responsible. (Yes, it’s a blatant Chinatown knockoff, a reference Verbinski happily admits to.) Production began small, in Verbinski’s own hom