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Rango's brazen, bravura weirdness is both its best feature and the thing that makes it the most off-putting. This is one daffy movie. It isn't an attention-deficit-addled, hyperactive goofiness, thankfully; Rango's humour is largely played subtle to the point of subliminal. Rather, this is the weirdness of Concepts and Ideas and female leads who freeze unintentionally in mid-sentence. Rango is suffused with a general sense of Not Doing Things The Same Way, by way of - holy shit - an actual attempt to tell a meaningful story, with layers, about a CGI lizard! I watched the first twenty or thirty minutes with my jaw cracked open in delight/wonder, because regardless of any other yardstick applied to the merits of the film, I can honestly say I've never seen anything like this.

Rango might be the fever-dream Captain Jack Sparrow had, while lying unconscious in the salt-flat Nirvana of Davy Jones' Locker in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (just after he captained a crew made up entirely of copies of himself, and just before his ship was carried to the beach by an army of like-minded crabs). Rango doesn't just riff on salt-flat deserts and bottomless thirst and hives of creatures with minds of their own; it also plays with pirates and Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Depp and being an actor and transcendence and the Spirit of the West and the meaning of movies and adventures themselves. This is a deep Chinese puzzle box of unfolding concepts and ideas, and it's wayyyyyyyyyyyyy the hell more sophisticated than an army of eight-year-olds going to see the funny cartoon lizard on a Saturday afternoon are going to be expecting. (To whit: another venturesome live-action filmmaker, George Miller, made another CGI animated kids' movie playing at a higher level, Happy Feet; and now that Gore Verbinski has done his, I'm starting to hope everone does one, sooner or later. Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are on deck for later this year.)

The Rango of the title is the adopted name of a diffident gekko who finds himself out of the glass terrarium and lost in the middle of the desert, looking for water. He comes upon a town of critters who are endangered precipitously by the same drought, complete with a Chiatownesque robber baron Mayor in a wheelchair who may or may not be harming the townfolk. Rango, being an actor (!) and having spent the last twenty minutes of the film wondering "who he is, man, like really," decides to play sherrif and become hero to the town.

Well, if you can like any main character if he's good at his job, then we're in trouble with Rango, because he's not only a passable sherrif by little more than luck and happenstance, but he's making the whole thing up anyway. The existential musings of a lizard with an identity problem (and who can blame him? He can change colours, but only to varying verisons of neon blue or electric pink) are a dangerous frame to hang a story on, because we've either really gotta care about Rango, or really care about his world, and we move so quickly past both that it's hard to get fixated on either. To be sure, the world of Rango is a treat - designed by Mark "Crash" McCreery, each character is a walking eyegasm - and Roger Deakins continues to cash his paycheques as visual consultant for CGI worlds. Oh: and I'm working on a theory where Gore Verbinski might be the best technical director working today. For animated verve and sheer cinemattitude, this movie's a treat to watch. But the grown-up jokes in Rango's wordplay move by so fast that grown-ups will miss them while kids won't even notice they were there, and the defiant turns in the story towards the hallucinogenic and flat-out bizarre kick us out of the movie over and over again.

It's a frustrating mix. Two examples. Example one: when the inevitable occurs and Rango is found out and kicked out of the town, he takes a mental mindwalk across the highway of metaphor, and the landscape and the character and the music and the stars all swell together into perfect, ecstatic truth. Right then and there, the film hits the sweet spot, and you'll remember it a long while. Example two: mindwalk completed, Rango actually encounters the Spirit of the West, and based on who that is, you'll find yourself wondering if this metatextual story choice is the thing that makes the movie amazing, or the thing that makes the movie awful.

But that's the chance of it, I guess. Whatever else you might say, or however much the film might or might not pull you in, Rango is not the same old thing. In these parts, that's what heroes are made of. And when it's all done, and Gore Verbinski has a shelf with all of his movies on it, Rango is going to be on that shelf. And that's pretty cool.

Post script: you might be wondering why a 3D-CGI animated movie, à la Pixar or Gnomeo and Juliet, has not been output in 3-D for a moviegoing experience, especially given that every single trailer that played before it ended with ever-larger "in 3-D!!" cards. I wondered, too. I assume it's because Gore Verbinski isn't an asshole.