CGI=KID STUFF? OF RANGO, RABBITS AND RINGS

Okay, I just saw the movie Rango.

It was pleasantly subversive in that it had no cute characters, no pretty or handsome faces, no real love interest.

Even more than the Spaghetti Westerns it’s riffing on (which usually at least had the erotically sweaty Claudia Cardinale), Rango is a parade of leering or sneering grotesques–none more so than the title character, whose oversized head is that of a photorealistic chameleon.

I liked that.

Plus it’s a beautiful-looking film, as anyone might expect from the first CGI feature created by the special-effects powerhouse ILM.  And it’s a bit dark, surreal, and existential in the slapstick-y way of director Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.  There are fun little inside gags that no kid will possibly comprehend, such as a brief cameo by Hunter S. Thompson, and a large dose of Chinatown.  That’s all good.

Yet in the end, I thought, Is that it?

Is that all we can hope for from the infinite possibilities of CGI technology?

Gorgeous scenery and smart pop-culture references?  And that’s at best—the other CGI kids’ movies they showed in the previews made me want to blow my brains out.  Do we need a Constitutional amendment banning egregious Tarantino music?  What kind of people are greenlighting these things?  Didn’t they ever have a powerful movie experience as children?  Don’t they want other kids to have that same life-changing thrill?

I think of the movies that shocked and moved me as a kid: Oliver!, Old Yeller, Bambi, 101 Dalmations, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Sure, there was a place for lightweight piffle like The Boatniks or Herbie the Love Bug, but even as a tot I knew they were no substitute for the real deal: a movie that took kids seriously.

One of the previews at Rango was for some crap comedy about the Easter Bunny, a mixture of CGI and live action, and I was thinking what a travesty it is to make such incredibly lifelike animated rabbits just to waste them on trash like this.

You want to make do a project with rabbits in it?  Make Watership Down!

I have no doubt that most of the empty suits in Hollywood have already come to the conviction that the great novel Watership Down, by Richard Adams, is unfilmable.

It’s too violent, full of animals torturing and killing each other.  Kids would be traumatized, women would hate it, and you can’t pitch it to guys because it’s about cute bunnies!  Not to mention it’s already been done as a cartoon, and who remembers that?

But I’m telling you, put the Rango team or the Pixar people in charge of visualizing that story, and it would be bigger than Lord of the Rings.  In fact, that’s how they should be thinking about it:  Lord of the Rings with rabbits.

That was the problem with the cartoon—it was too short, too crude, and its scale was too small.  Exactly the same thing that happened with the dud cartoon version of Lord of the Rings.

Just as that had to sacrifice all the majesty of Tolkien’s books, the cartoon Watership Down had to forego the fantasy elements of Adams’ tale, the rabbit Creation fables, as well as much of the main story.  Watership Down is one book, but there’s at least two movies there, one about the rabbits’ journey to find their Promised Land, another about them holding it against the Nazi-like Efrafans.

But the key would be to take it seriously.

Don’t dumb it down, don’t joke it up, and (most importantly) don’t market it to kids.  Kids will come, of course, but treat it with the respect that Peter Jackson gave Tolkien—treat it as the Best Picture it deserves to be—and adults will come, too.

More importantly, it might lead the way out of this depressing cage that CGI movies have been stuck in for far too long.