Rango is a lizard who imagines himself an actor who literally breaks the fourth wall of his terrarium when the hatchback car in which he is riding swerves and sends him careening. Abandoned in the desert amid the shards of his former home, Rango makes his way to the nearby town of Dirt, which is experiencing a mysterious water shortage. The actor in Rango seizes the opportunity to invent a grandiloquent new image for himself, and as in many a Western, the stranger in town is suddenly promoted to the rank of sheriff. Along the way to solving the mystery of the vanishing water supply, he must survive highway crossings, giant hawks, an army of bat-riding prairie dogs, and a gun slinging rattlesnake.