Rango, a weird and wonderful animated film directed by Gore Verbinski, serves up a giant hat tip to spaghetti westerns with a bit of Fear and Loathing thrown in.

The first animated feature from Industrial Light & Magic, the film is richly detailed, from the dirt billowing across the desert to the way the animal characters’ eyes dart back and forth. How did the clever animators make the loveable lizard Rango, voiced by Johnny Depp, so lifelike?

One key ingredient: fuzz.

“‘Fuzz’ is a word Gore uses a lot,” says Hal Hickel, ILM’s animation director, in the Wired.com video above. “He’ll say, ‘You know that’s good, the bones on that are good, the basics are good. Now just put some fuzz on it. And he means, ‘Make it imperfect.’ Find anomalies, imperfections to kind of break it up and not have it be totally normal and comfortable…. Everything needed to be dirty, gritty and very tactile.”

Verbinski, who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, also had Rango’s voice actors perform together so the animation could flow from realistic body language.

“It was like a very strange, D-company regional theater,” says Depp of the unusual moviemaking tactic.

Find out more about the cutting-edge animation of Rango, which was released last week on Blu-ray and DVD, in the video interview above.