Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Directed by Rich Moore
Wreck-It Ralph is the 9-foot-tall, 643-pound villain of an arcade video game named Fix-It Felix Jr., in which the game's titular hero fixes buildings that Ralph destroys. Wanting to prove he can be a good guy and not just a villain, Ralph escapes his game and lands in Hero's Duty, a first-person shooter where he helps the game's hero battle against alien invaders. He later enters Sugar Rush, a kart racing game set on tracks made of candies, cookies and other sweets. There, Ralph meets Vanellope von Schweetz who has learned that her game is faced with a dire threat that could affect the entire arcade, and one that Ralph may have inadvertently started.
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25 films that influenced Wreck-It Ralph
What critics say influenced Wreck-It Ralph
The beginning is reminiscent of Toy Story , with an underground world of video games that come to life once the arcade closes for the night and characters who leave their game to explore other worlds.
The concept is a little like that of Toy Story : the characters in video games have existences of their own and, once the arcade is closed, they can roam around, even crossing over into other games.
With bouncy CG that's given greater depth by 3-D, director Rich Moore 's film blends the secret-lives-of-toys reality of Toy Story with the self-actualization vibe of Bolt, with the former proving far more electric than the latter.
Disney's variant on themes from Pixar's Toy Story is a mixed bag of frantic action, humorous antics and blunted satire pitched squarely at the juvenile.
Executive Producer John Lasseter is the man behind Toy Story, and it shows.
Unlocking the Pixar cheat-code for No. 1 blockbusters, Disney's "Wreck-It Ralph" features winsome voice-overs by comedians playing it kid-safe, a simplistic yet universal moral and even "Toy Story" director John Lasseter as executive producer.
The Disney tribute to arcade gaming is delightfully off the rails, offering a grown-up-friendly tone and merging of visual styles that are reminiscent of the studio's 1988 animated homage to film noir, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit."
Various events and significant moments throughout the film are noticeably reminiscent of movies from The Iron Giant to Shrek to Who Framed Roger Rabbit .
And there are any number of non-videogame references as well, ranging from a ridiculous but adorable Wizard Of Oz visual joke to Firefly / Dollhouse star Alan Tudyk voicing Sugar Rush’s daffy, mostly affable King Candy in direct imitation of chortling Disney vet Ed Wynn (the Mad Hatter from 1951’s Alice In Wonderland and Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins).
Perhaps it is no surprise that a Disney film that celebrates outsiders (Ralph the ‘villain’ and Vanellope the ‘glitch’) over social cohesion should contain a variation of a character from Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske, 1951), the most anarchic and unconventional of the classic Disney animated feature films.
The Walt Disney Pictures films Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) previously attempted to transform gaming logic and iconography into narrative cinema, but it is the computer-animation feature Wreck-It Ralph that demonstrates the full potential of the concept.
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And the first step to that fate — akin to Toy Story 2’s Jessie being left curbside — is having an out-of-order sign slapped on its screen, an act that casts an ominous reddish-yellow glow on the world within.
But that isn’t the purpose of this film - by staying in Sugar Rush the movie allows that friendship to really deepen and grow into one of the fullest relationships I’ve seen between two animated characters since... well, since Toy Story 2.
Putting aside Tim Burton's Frankenweenie , which is an animal of a different sort (black-and-white stop-motion), Wreck-It Ralph is probably the most effective animated family offering thus far in 2012.
Dozens of films have failed at bringing established video game properties to the movie screen, but for their latest piece of feature-length digital animation Disney has borrowed a page from fun flicks like Tron, The Last Starfighter, and Wargames.
Wreck-It Ralph plays out a little like a screwball comedy, with Vanellope absolutely vexing Ralph because of her energy, her enthusiasm, and her wide-eyed naiveté, with Ralph coming around as reluctantly as Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby .
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A similar concept was handled more effectively in The Nightmare Before Christmas, which at least made it clear that Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween who tried his hand at Christmas for a change, was just having a little nervous breakdown and temporarily forgot how much he loved his job in the first place.
The Walt Disney Pictures films Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) previously attempted to transform gaming logic and iconography into narrative cinema, but it is the computer-animation feature Wreck-It Ralph that demonstrates the full potential of the concept.