Isla Fisher has joined the cast of Gore Verbinski’s toon adventure Rango as the female voice lead.
The Confessions of a Shopaholic star will play alongside Johnny Depp and Abigail Breslin, who have already boarded the Paramount Pictures project. Alfred Molina, Ray Winstone, Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty round out the voice cast.
Story centers on a household pet (Depp) who goes on an adventure to discover his true self.
Fisher revealed that the entire film will be filmed in a pretty unusual manner. The actors will film their performances, but rather than serving as the basis for motion capture, they’ll merely serve as aide to the animators capturing their movements and facial expressions. It’s something more elaborate than the usual camera-in-a-sound-booth approach that has been used for decades — and really, might be some combination of motion capture and animation. Earlier, Verbinski described it as cutting-edge animation techniques that “will allow us to capture and translate every aspect of Johnny’s performance, using it to drive the computer-generated character in a way that has yet to be seen in an animated feature.” It’s one to watch out for — and we’ll find out what they’re talking about sometime in 2011, when Rango is set to be released.