The company, which pioneered digital effects starting in the 1970s, has put its “gee whiz, how’d they do that?” stamp on hundreds of movies (“Titanic,” “Forrest Gump” and the “Indiana Jones” and “Mission: Impossible” series, among others). Mementos like cars, spaceships and creature tongues line the hallways of its campuslike headquarters here, alongside framed Italian film posters from Mr. Lucas’s collection. As usual Industrial Light & Magic is a player in the technical categories at the Oscars, nominated this year for the visual effects and sound in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and the sound in “War Horse” (done at Skywalker Sound, a related company). But it is also a nominee in animation, with its first full-length animated film, “Rango.”  Directed by Gore Verbinski (whose credits include the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, also Industrial Light projects), “Rango,” about a lizard, voiced by Johnny Depp, who becomes a small-town sheriff, is in some ways an anomaly in contemporary animation: it is 2-D, not 3-D, and the filmmakers invented characters and story lines while hanging out together in a house. Then, instead of being locked alone in a booth, the actors recorded the voices together on a soundstage, wearing cowboy hats and using doofy props to improvise. This shambling style would seem at odds with the digital precision of Industrial Light. And that is exactly what veterans of the company liked about it.  In the popular imagination digital filmmaking — animated or live action — is a clean, sterile process, a lot of button pushing and knob tweaking. Though there’s some truth to that, this is an image that its pioneers, like the people at Pixar and Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital, have tried to controvert. In reality animators and effects maestros alike strive to inject humanity, in the form of blemishes and surprises, into their work, and that often takes hand-cranked effort — even if it’s surrounded by millions of dollars of high-tech wizardry.  “Computers want to make everything perfect, they want to make everything shiny and clean and polished, and we’re always trying to beat that out of them,” said Hal Hickel, the animation director of “Rango.”  Set in the fictional town of Dirt, with a cast of mangy, hard-to-identify animals, “Rango” is a good example of imperfection: the look is all dusty and sweaty, with stray grit and hair. Mr. Verbinski, who made his animation debut with the film, called it fuzz, and he was constantly asking his animators to add it into shots.  “What he meant was, find some imperfections, put a little hitch in it or a little twitch under the character’s eye or just some little idiosyncrasy,” Mr. Hickel said. “Gore would say we were always having to fabricate anomaly.”  In his office, beneath a sign reading “No Right Angles,” John Bell, the supervising art director of “Rango,” pulled out a sheaf of his drawings to demonstrate. Yes, paper sketches: Mr. Bell, a longtime animator who has worked on films from “Back to the Future” (he helped design the hoverboard) to Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.,” begins his work with a notepad and a fat carpenter pencil. “I’m a 20th-century holdover,” he said, laughing. For “Rango” he drafted the flophouse and the mayor’s mansion, considering details like whether the doorknobs would be shiny or rusted, and what oil paintings the mayor might have of himself.  “Everything has to be thought of, everything has to be designed — the path of the sun, what’s the dirt look like,” he said.  For inspiration animators and effects experts look to art, books, movies and, naturally, YouTube. “I was just looking at something this morning, it was a crow snowboarding down a snowy roof in a little piece of plastic,” said Mr. Hickel, who began his career at Industrial Light with “The Lost World,” the sequel to “Jurassic Park.” “You look at that, and you think: ‘Someday I’m going to have to animate a snowboarding bird. I better hold onto that.’ ”  (For a scene in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” in which Blackbeard is “turned into a vortex of swirling flesh and blood,” as Mr. Bell put it, he YouTubed clips of meat in a blender.)  Of course at Industrial Light, there are also high-tech resources. The image-capture studio, ringed with 45 high-fidelity cameras, employs technology used in the military and medical fields, as well as proprietary software. James Cameron and Michael Bay have come through, for “Titanic” and “Transformers.” In a corner, near a beat-up mannequin, hung a motion-capture suit. “Almost every movie we have has some form of what we would call a digital double or a humanoid performance,” said Mike Sanders, a digital supervisor at Industrial Light.  For “Rango” the studio was used as a stand-in soundstage; monitors showed different views of the townscape of Dirt. “The camera system in this room is triangulating where these points are in space,” Mr. Sanders said, handing me an iPad-like device that functioned as a joystick. “Computers back there tell us: ‘I know where you are in the room. I’m going to put you in the same spot inside the town of Dirt.’ ” As I walked around the room with the joystick, angling it, I moved through Dirt, getting a new perspective on the scene — a real-life way to navigate through digital space. It’s a tool, Mr. Sanders said, to tell animators where a camera should go or how to set up a shot, and it felt like being inside a very cool video game.  Coolness is definitely a factor at Industrial Light & Magic. “What’s next?” Mr. Sanders said. “How can we outdo ourselves? That’s a big part of storytelling.”  Sometimes, though, all they need is a body. Faced with a tight deadline on “Titanic” and a scene on the deck that wasn’t really working, Mr. Sanders pulled an all-nighter. “I got the deck chair, and I just shot in the motion-capture library, doing different things in a deck chair,” he said. He altered his image digitally later, but he is literally every body on the deck of the “Titanic.” Mr. Bay too has appeared in some scenes in “Transformers,” only to be digitally scrubbed later.  For “Rango” Mr. Verbinski videotaped his cast members as they did their voice-overs and gave the footage to the animators as a template. Speaking of Isla Fisher, who voiced the love interest, Beans, Mr. Hickel said, “Gore would go through it with us and say: ‘I love what Isla’s doing here with her eyes. It’s very funny. And Johnny’s got a great hand gesture here on this line.”  It’s a technique that animators use themselves, in much more DIY fashion. In a corner of the compound there is a little room lined with mirrors, where they go and tape themselves performing scenes. “We go a lot into our acting room,” said Maia Kayser, who animated Beans. “It’s a fun part of the process, because it’s a good way to explore ideas.”  That these multimillion-dollar blockbusters are made in the same way many of the creators first approached them — acting out their favorite scenes privately — is not lost on the people here. How many people at Industrial Light are “Star Wars” nerds? “Pretty much all of them,” Mr. Hickel said cheerfully. “You’ve always got some people who try to be cool about it. They’d be like: ‘Who was that snow creature that attacks? I can’t think of what the name is,’ and you know full well that they know it’s a Wampa.”
âRango,â Industrial Light & Magicâs first film nominated for an animation Oscar, began with pencil sketches. Its voices were recorded together on a soundstage, not in booths.