Rango is a 2011 American animated Western comedy film directed by Gore Verbinski and written by John Logan. The film stars Johnny Depp as Rango, with Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ray Winstone and Timothy Olyphant in supporting roles. In the film, a pet chameleon ends up in the town of Dirt, an outpost that is in desperate need of a new sheriff.

The film contains a number of references to various other films, including The Shakiest Gun in the West, A Fistful of Dollars, Chinatown, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Cat Ballou, Raising Arizona and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Verbinski has also cited El Topo as an influence on the film. Visual effects for the film were outsourced to Industrial Light & Magic.

Rango premiered on February 14, 2011 at Westwood, Los Angeles, and was released in the United States on March 4. The film received positive reviews from critics and grossed $246 million worldwide against a $135 million budget. At the 84th Academy Awards, Rango won Best Animated Feature. Following its critical and commercial success, Rango would lead to the formation of Paramount Animation.

A theatrically-minded pet veiled chameleon becomes stranded in the Mojave Desert after his terrarium accidentally falls out of his owners' car. Now left to fend for himself, he learns from the cause of the accident, nine-banded armadillo hermit Roadkill, who is seeking a mystical being known as the "Spirit of the West", about an American frontier-like town known by its animalistic populace as Dirt, where water comes in through a mysterious rite on Wednesdays. Out of options, the chameleon heads out into the desert. After a near-fatal encounter with a vicious red-tailed hawk, he meets desert iguana rancher Beans, who takes him to Dirt.

Asked about his identity, the chameleon presents himself to the townsfolk as a tough drifter named "Rango" and quickly runs afoul of Gila monster outlaw Bad Bill, who challenges him to a duel. The hawk interrupts it and chases Rango, who accidentally knocks over an empty water tower that crushes the hawk to death. Believing he did so intentionally, the townsfolk praise Rango, who is appointed as the new sheriff by Dirt's elderly desert tortoise mayor. Meanwhile, the townsfolk worry that with the hawk vanquished, infamous western diamondback rattlesnake gunslinger Rattlesnake Jake, who fears predators such as it, will return.

With the town desperate for water during a drought, Beans demands that Rango investigates and in doing so, he inadvertently assists a mole bandit named Balthazar in stealing the water supply after mistaking him for a prospector. Rango organizes a posse that later finds the banker, Johannes Merrimack III, dead in the middle of the desert from, oddly enough, drowning. The posse tracks the robbers to their hideout, where they fight Balthazar's bat-riding clan over the stolen water's water dispenser bottle storage before discovering it to be empty. Despite professing that they found it like that, Balthazar and his prairie dog sons, Jedidiah and Ezekiel, are taken into custody.

After being questioned by Rango about his purchasing of the land around Dirt, the mayor, soon revealed to be responsible for Merrimack's death, summons Rattlesnake Jake, who runs Rango out of town after exposing his lies. Dejected, Rango returns to where he was separated from his owners, where he passes out after he crosses to the other side of the highway. He eventually meets the Spirit of the West, an elderly Man with No Name, who advises him to go back to Dirt and set things right, telling him that "No man can walk out on his own story".

With the aid of Roadkill and mystical moving yuccas, Rango discovers an emergency shut-off valve in a water pipeline at Las Vegas, which the mayor had been manipulating to cause the water shortage for his scandal. Rango returns to Dirt and challenges Jake to a duel, in reality, a diversion staged by his allies, which include Balthazar's clan, to allow the restoration of the town's water in order to make his resolve clear. However, the mayor forces Rango to surrender by threatening Beans' life before attempting to drown the duo inside the bank's vault.