The thing you’ll have to remember about Rango, which is today’s review target, is that it combines so many disparate concepts together that, alone, are usually worthwhile, but when you put them together, you get a much larger and much more impressive whole than this has any real right to be.

Rango follows a chameleon who, formerly, lived in a terrarium, and spent a lot of time blending in. But when events find him in the middle of the Mojave Desert, Rango’s going to have to do a lot more blending in than even he thought possible. Landing in the sleepy desert town of Dirt, he invents a rough-and-tumble persona (featuring a long and rambling diatribe explaining how he managed to kill seven outlaws with just one bullet) named Rango, he quickly becomes the town’s hero after, largely accidentally, killing a hawk. It doesn’t take the townsfolk long to make him the new Sheriff, but soon, Rango discovers a whole lot of trouble waiting just under the surface.

Like I said above, there are a lot of dissimilar elements here. First off, this is a Western. That by itself is rare in theaters any more–seeing more than three Westerns in a year any more is a banner year. Second, it’s a cartoon. A Western is rare enough…an animated Western? Now that’s something to pay attention to. Now reunite fully three folks from the Pirates of the Caribbean series (director Gore Verbinski, Jack Sparrow himself Johnny Depp, and Davy Jones, or Bill Nighy) and put them all together.

Don’t light a match anywhere near that pot. In fact, it’s best if you don’t even imagine fire in the same room with that kind of mixture.

While we all know that the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts, this is just that. Jammed to the gills with parody, heaps of laughs, and good old fashioned gunslinging violence, Rango has got a lot going for it. Watch for a particularly clever encounter involving the “Spirit of the West”–I won’t spoiler it, but you’d do well to not be drinking anything after just after Rango crosses the road on the backs of several pillbugs. Trust me on this.

Would I take the kids to this one? No, probably not. There’s also a heaping helping of mild obscenities going on here, and if the kids weren’t terrified of snakes before, they will be once they get a good look at main villain Rattlesnake Jake, a monstrous diamondback rattler with a Gatling gun for a rattle, voice by, as above, former Davy Jones Bill Nighy. That’s a guaranteed recipe for an incredible movie villain, and Nighy playing the heavy is, once again, a welcome sight.

But still! Laughs aplenty, incredible action, top-notch characters and direction, there is virtually nothing to not like about this highly entertaining romp. Success was pretty much guaranteed just from the spec sheet, so it’s not going to surprise anyone at all that this is good stuff. Even the music is fun, with Los Lobos clearly channelling Dick Dale for the end song.

How good? Good enough for the Screenhead Ten Scale to cheerfully hand over a ten out of ten to an animated Western that really shouldn’t have been this good, but was.