Rated PG

This is one singularly eccentric movie. It’s a wildly referential western caricature that rides a territory somewhere between the frat-boy slapstick of “Blazing Saddles” and the brain-bending existentialism of “El Topo.” Animated creatures and a few fart jokes notwithstanding, it is not a movie made with your children in mind—unless your children hang around college film courses eating peyote.

If there was any question that this film is a one-way ticket to bat country, it’s answered less than five minutes into the show, when our lizardy little hero, thrown from the safety of his terrarium in a car packed for Vegas, splats on the windshield of Doctor Gonzo himself, Hunter S. Thompson.

And then things start getting weird. Apparently surviving the accident but stranded in the burning Mojave wasteland, the chameleon first encounters an armadillo shaman full of sage advice for “reaching the other side.” Seeing as this wise old mentor has just been gruesomely, non-metaphorically squashed in two, his presence might indicate that the lizard has entered his own personal afterlife.

It’s established back in the terrarium that this guy suffers from a dramatic flair for casting himself as the leading man in his own lonely stage productions. Having never experienced the outside world, he flirts with headless Barbie torsos and saves wind-up fish in a parade of various Hollywood genres.

His meeting with the old, probably recently deceased armadillo (named “Road Kill” in the credits, by the way) triggers an expedition across a great, parched emptiness to a suspiciously prototypical Old West settlement. There, he lives out an improbable fantasy of adventure and empowerment of which he is the absolute center.

Named sheriff by the beastly population of assorted yokel varmints, he travels into a dangerous underworld and confronts public officials who say things like “water is life” as they deny even a drop to the town. His journey drifts occasionally, with nary a hat tip of transition, into trippy, dreamily stylized “Davey Jones Locker” sequences. It’s never clear whether he is hallucinating the entire story. His final showdown is a grand standoff against a rattlesnake identified explicitly as “The Grim Reaper.” If that’s not enough of a hint, the lizard is voiced by Johnny Depp, whose last western was called “Dead Man.”

It’s no small detail, either, that the main character, facing an unambiguous identity crisis (he asks the question “Who am I?” no fewer than three times) is never granted an actual name. He appropriates the name “Rango” from an old booze bottle, and even the lawman shield he pins on his chest has no designation—not sheriff, not marshal, just a simple tin star. Even as he achieves approval and affirmation from his newfound community, his primary quest for self-validation remains oddly unfulfilled. This lack of resolution might seem like a lost thread, among many, if you don’t enter the story with a little Dante in mind. Not very many kids’ movies bleed such grave implication.

This philosophical theory, as reachy, sub-textual and generally Beetle Juicey as it may be, will do nothing to distract from an audience’s enjoyment of the actual adventure. The surface plot, past any “Sixth Sense” musings, is pure “Chinatown,” deliberately lifting whole scenes and characters from the Polanski classic. The art direction and cinematography—animated with an immersive and completely convincing photorealism—is supervised by long-time Coen collaborator Roger Deakins (“True Grit,” “No Country for Old Men”) and completely eclipses its obvious Sergio Leone inspirations. With unparalleled skill, depth, texture and detail, ILM Studios has created an aggressively repugnant townsfolk apparently grown from warts, cauliflowers, pig bristles and, horrifyingly enough, infected foreskins. Hans Zimmer’s score, as always, is a great match for the visuals, screeching and crawling and soaring like the best spaghetti westerns of Ennio Morricone.

It’s apparent that everyone involved strapped on their big guns for this effort, and the only complaint is that there might be just a little too much going on. We’ve got five villains, three showdowns, and hundreds of different critters of all shapes, sizes and species. Though the individual situations and players are suitably buoyant and lively, even at only 107 minutes, the story feels unnecessarily overstuffed, threatening to collapse under its own excesses by the finale.

The good Doctor Thompson once wrote, “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” He also wrote, “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamned animals?”

Pick either, or both, to think on as you mosey in to “Rango.” They both apply.