LOS ANGELES—Making computer animation look organic isn’t easy. But an earthy look and feel are exactly what Rango director Gore Verbinski wanted. The animated feature, which opens next Friday (March 4), follows a pet chameleon (voiced by Johnny Depp) who finds himself stranded in the desert when his terrarium falls off a moving vehicle. There he discovers the town of Dirt, inhabited by a motley crew of rodents, reptiles, amphibians, and birds facing a dire water crisis.

Finding a way to appropriately depict this world was up to Industrial Light & Magic’s team, including animation director Hal Hickel. Hickel says that ILM—which had worked with Verbinski over the course of the three Pirates of the Caribbean films—had done animated work before, ranging from stop-motion to CG work, but had never made a full animated feature.

“It very quickly became clear, as Gore described his vision for the film, that what he wanted was something very different from the clean, tidy, neat, shiny, colourful mainstream feature animation that I think we’ve become accustomed to in the last 10 or 15 years, particularly since computer animation has come to the fore,” Hickel says at a Beverly Hills news conference. “He wanted something dirty, dusty, sweaty, grimy, crusty, fuzzy. And it wasn’t just an exercise in gross-out, or just weirdness for weirdness’s sake. There was a real intention behind it stemming from a lot of things, from a love of the Sergio Leone westerns and that look of all the actors always looking gritty and sweaty. And also it was just toward the goal of crafting a really intentioned, deliberate, tactile world you could believe in—something not photo-real but maybe photo-surreal.”

Their main obstacle was the fact that “computers tend to like things clean and mathematically perfect.”

ILM visual-effects supervisor Tim Alexander adds that they achieved their goal by emphasizing imperfections. “A lot of films, you’ll see that they’ll build one side [of a character] and then just mirror it over to the other side. All of our characters are asymmetric. So, like Rango, for example: he’s trapezoidal and he’s got a neck that’s going off to one side. And almost every single character has some sort of asymmetry to them.” Other overt examples include a one-eared rabbit and a bird with an arrow through one eye.

Hickel adds that they also avoided the large, googly eyes typical of cartoon characters. Rango’s tiny, beady eyes are a prime example. “We really felt like there was an opportunity here,” he says. “We had looked at a lot of pictures of chameleons, and there’s really something cool about those eyes, something soulful and interesting that we thought was sort of a tradeoff for whatever we might have to battle against.”

The goal, Hickel says, was to make things “odd, not broad”—something Verbinski had repeatedly emphasized. “Animators tend to want to animate the hell out of things, and getting them to do things in a more quiet, sort of natural way was kind of a learning curve,” Hickel says, “but [we were] always telling them”¦”˜Just find the still moments, the quiet moments, the awkward humour.’ ”

With Rango’s eccentric cast of characters, they certainly explored all of that. And more.