An animated film that you really need to see a few times is a rare commodity.

Pixar has been on the cutting edge of making animated films that speak to young and old(er) alike. And they have proven that you never quite can see it coming if it’s really great. Even the three-quel of Toy Story was a serious turn in that series of films, speaking to deeper, more complex emotions about change and loss than the first two successful and charming films.

Gore Verbinski, with LucasFilm as his animation company, just made a film the goes right to the top of that Pixar tree. In fact, I would say, right now, that the only animated film that could beat Rango for the Oscar next year (for Animated Feature) is Tintin, presuming that Spielberg’s film is run as an animated film. Both films will be released by Paramount. Neither film is from DreamWorks Animation. And both films will be animated in an heretofore untraditional way, Spielberg using much of the WETA-developed technology that Cameron used for Avatar to make his motion capture animated film. (Ironically, it was DreamWorks that gave Verbinsku his big feature film break, with Mouse Hunt and then The Mexican.)

It’s thrilling, really. Sometimes we forget that studio releases can be cutting edge and weighty in film history they way we often think of “indie” films.

Rango is a movie about movies.

It’s a western homage, first and foremost, ranging from High Noon to Star Wars with plenty of Boetticher in the mix. But Verbinski, who gets a shared story credit with the screenplay credit going to John Logan (another likely nominee next year), freely steals from every corner of film and culture.

At times, you feel like he is doing his personally preferred version of films he already made, especially the opening “Dead Cap’n Jack” sequence at the top of Pirates 3. There’s a bit that seems like a variation of Knick Knack, the great Pixar feature that was the first widely seen public face of CG Animation. There is the greek chorus, here embodied by Mariachi owls.

But mostly, this is about the spirit of the west and The Spirit of the West. (That won’t make sense until you see the film… and don’t let anyone spoil the pleasure of joy The Spirit adds to the party.) Rango is the everyman who dreams of being a hero, gets the chance to play the role, fails, stops believing in himself, and then finds the spirit to rise again. It’s a pretty basic movie tale. But it’s the beauty of the journey that makes this a great movie experience.

The magic trick, I think, is that Verbinski is artist enough to adhere to or to disregard “the rules” as he sees fit. The town of Dirt, for instance, is made up of junk and garbage. The bar, for instance, is housed in an old 5-gallon gas can. But he doesn’t sell that as a gag. It’s in the edges of the frame, visible, but not emphasized. It’s never (well, rarely), “Look at how clever we are.” It’s just clever.

The Mayor of Dirt is in a wheelchair. I didn’t fully realize he was a turtle until he is out of his chair in one scene. And in that moment, it was both a surprise and obvious. That is how I felt about the film, over and over and over again.

It’s in the writing too. There are a lot of dead ends in Rango… every one of which works. It’s a hard kind of humor to do. But Verbinski & Co make it work.

And there is great unexpected beauty. Pill bugs. Weathered water-hungry trees. The odd appearance of human beings, who feel, even more than the rest of the film, like they were caricatured by the great Drew Friedman or Jason Seiler, including a head-spinning reference to Johnny Depp… but not.

This movie is so not the movie that Paramount has been selling. I guess “Johnny Depp is Rango” is an easier pitch. The movie is profoundly odd, in the most beautiful way. And Depp is both brilliant… and gently part of a great ensemble of voice actors. He is not doing as much as he often does with his characters. The choices he’s made are very specific and very strong, but not very showy. He is the fulcrum of the piece, not the flavor. (This is the danger in Pirates 4. In the prior films, Depp was the showstopper, but the lovers were the fulcrum, allowing Depp to dominated but to still be “the character actor.” We’ll see how that works in the new film.)

Rango is a movie lover’s movie. See it with your 50-year-old neighbor who has bookshelves filled with DVDs. He will love it more than the 8-year-old sitting next to him. But that 8-year-old? He or She will treasure Rango for a lifetime, the way we have all held The Wizard of Oz or Bullwinkle (animated version, thanks) or the stories of the Brothers Grimm or Bambi or Pinocchio or Up or The Little Mermaid, etc, etc. The film will challenge the little ones. They won’t get all the jokes and the subtext. But as they grow, they will grow into more and more of the film. And when they see Rango again while smoking a joint in their first dorm room in the first week of college in 2021, they will laugh as hard and as long as the first time they saw it and they mostly laughed at all the funny insects and reptiles doing physical schtick.

I wanted to headline this review “Pirates of the Amphibians,” until I realized that there were only one or two amphibious creatures in the film. But the moniker fits in spirit, if not in specific. And giving it one more thought, that might make it the perfect way to describe this film. No box fits. Thank the movie gods!