Wreck-It Ralph is
videogame nostalgia blended with candy obsession. With it’s bright colors and
the occasional annoying pop-song, it’s a sugar rush to the senses and kids will
dig it. Adults may overdose.
The movie begins
with the Wreck-It Ralph game being played and the 8-bit rendering is down to
the last detail, everything you could expect from an early eighties arcade
game. Then the arcade reaches its closing time and all the characters come to
life as we the audience, are transported inside their world where everything is
three-dimensional but some of the jerky animation is still preserved.
As a kid, I found
the videogames I played to be kind of magical and inspiring but the concept of
them coming to life or having an internal real world never occurred to me while
toys coming to life did, like in Toy Story. When I saw cartoons as living
beings working the movie business in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that seemed
kind of natural too. However, I think the concept of video game characters
coming to life in the arcade after closing time isn't a fantasy I can relate to. Whatever, I’ll go with it.
The characters
socialize by traveling through the arcade’s circuitry but when they venture
outside their game they run the risk of dying without an extra life to help
them. They also have the top priority of fulfilling their roles to keep the
game working correctly during operating hours. Getting unplugged by the arcade
owner is the worst fate. Cute. That’s what this movie is. Just imagine Shrek
meets Tron and you’ve got it. That’s not the best news for animation
enthusiasts. It depends on what you value in movies like this. Personally I’m
annoyed by animated movies that try to thrive solely on their cuteness. I love Ratatouille and I hate Madagascar. Wreck-It Ralph is somewhere in the
middle.
Like Donkey Kong,
Ralph is the bad-guy of his thirty-year-old videogame and is having a midlife
crisis (I wonder how bad videogame characters get when they turn forty). He
chooses to jump into other videogames to see if he can find his place as a good
guy instead. Ralph is perfectly voiced by John C. Reilly. Along the way he ends
up in a candy-themed race-car game ruled over by King Candy voiced by Alan Tudyk
channeling Ed Wynn’s Mad Hatter. There he meets a reject named Vanellope,
voiced with gleeful obnoxiousness by Sarah Silverman, who wants to race but
can’t because her character has a programing glitch. Ralph befriends her and
learns the value of being a real good-guy while he helps someone no one else
wants to.
It's a generally fun movie but it was all I expected it to be and nothing more.
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