Video game aesthetics have borrowed from Hollywood
spectacles, which in turn borrowed right back, but Disney’s
Wreck-It Ralph, a bright, amusing
animated comedy set in a world of game characters in an arcade, is interested
in game play on a tad more than a superficial level. In this movie, the games
are flexible, imaginatively malleable, and capable of shifting down to their
very code. Drawing upon a
Toy Story template,
the characters in the games of this arcade come to life when the gamers aren’t
looking. This allows for a movie of colorful creativity, creating impressive digital
backdrops as characters end up zapping themselves out the back of their games,
down through the power cords to a large power strip they call Game Central
Station, a meeting place from which they can end up in any game they choose.
But just because the characters can jump from game to game
doesn’t mean they should. Sure, some of the characters will party it up after
closing time, but no one actually interferes with another’s game play. They see
their fates as predetermined. At the movie’s start, we meet Wreck-It Ralph
(John C. Reilly), a massive, lumbering villain in a Donkey Kong-like game. He’s spent thirty years smashing up an 8-bit
high-rise only to watch day after day, level after level, the game’s namesake,
Fix-It Felix, Jr. (Jack McBrayer), save the day. Felix gets all the medals, but
Ralph’s left in the mud. That’s the routine and Ralph’s tired of it all. For no
other reason than because he’s a bad guy, one of the only characters in any
game he can really talk to is a ghost from Pac Man. For once, Ralph wants to
win a medal and be loved, so he throws off society’s shackles and wanders into
a couple of other games in his attempt to leave villainy behind.
He bumbles into
Hero’s
Duty, a first-person-shooter led by a sci-fi drill sergeant (Jane Lynch).
He suffers an intense culture shock that’s hardly alleviated when he rockets
over to the candy-coated kart racer
Sugar
Rush (think
Mario Kart)
and meets a spastic little girl (Sarah
Silverman, in an exaggerated cutesy voice) and the goofily tyrannical King
Candy (Alan Tudyk, unrecognizable with a loopy Ed Wynn voice). While Ralph is
off gathering an island of misfit code, Felix sets off to find him and prevent
their game from getting unplugged. The movie has a great deal of fun putting
these two guys – one constantly grumpy, the other all gee-whiz innocence – into
unfamiliar surroundings. When Felix first lays eyes on the shiny,
dark-green-glowing scenery of
Hero’s Duty
he gapes and whispers “High definition” in awe. When Ralph lumbers into
Sugar Rush he, through an elaborate
pratfall, ends up stuck in a giant cupcake and beaten by a pair of anthropomorphized
donuts (who are, of course, cops).
The plot’s rather uncomplicated, though it takes some fun twists
and turns, and the premise isn’t pushed as far as I’d hoped, but that’s not so
bad. As the movie settles into a nice, comfortable groove, it gathers a fine
message about following your heart, being kind to others, taking pride in your
job, and embracing your programming in order to transcend your programming. That’s all well and good, but where the
movie really works is in its breakneck speed and in its sharp, clever visuals, an
explosion of homage and imagination, colorfully rendered. Director Rich Moore’s
background with The Simpsons and Futurama might have something to do with
the fine voice work and the clever animation including mile-a-minute gags and
some unexpected reversals within dialogue, but the best part of the movie is
the distinct environments of the three games in play. Fix-It Felix Jr. is a world of black out of which a building emerges,
simple and blocky. Hero’s Duty is
dark as well, but detailed and sleek. Sugar
Rush is a place of overwhelming color and hyperactive silliness that lives
up to its name and then some. In what has to be the work of a crew of animators
who have much nostalgia for old video games, there are a great deal of cameos
peppering the background between games – from Bowser to Pong and from Sonic to
Q*bert – as well as strategic cutaways to renderings of the games as games.
In the end
Wreck-It
Ralph is an entertaining evocation of the way games work, where characters
use cheat codes to gain access to secret parts of the game and where our
protagonist moves through various worlds, defeating various obstacles, to try
to win, that is, get a medal and get back before the arcade opens and his
game’s unplugged for appearing to be out of order. (What else could you do with
a game that’s missing its bad guy?) When, in the final moments, the baddest bad
guy catches Ralph by surprise, the goofy slimeball gravely welcomes him to the
“boss level.” With such a heavy emphasis on games and programming, the plot
never really gathered suspense for me in the way it aims to and, though I liked
the characters, I was more amused and interested than invested in their plight.
A mention that dying in a foreign game means you won’t be regenerated seems
shoehorned in as an afterthought – the stakes seem cribbed from
The Matrix and
Inception, to name two movies that more successfully make dangerous
levels of “reality” a defining feature – and never really comes into play, but
no matter. It’s lightning fast and often very funny and cute. Besides, why
inject such expectations into what is intended and plays most satisfactorily as
nothing more than a blast of affectionate sugary delight with surges of
nostalgia for adults of a certain age?
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