WRECK-IT RALPH

If not a return to top form, Wreck-It Ralph should give Disney hope for going solo into CGI. Its colors are vibrant and the story has heart, two Disney pillars. It’s also a lot of fun, with more creativity than Disney has recently attempted, even when it retreats to familiar ground.

            Yes, its draw is a gimmick which comes with a built-in fanbase (and there are few loyalists more vocal than gamers) but it knows how to use its turf intelligently. Ostensibly the movie is traditional, a misunderstood outcast finds a niche for himself through the help of an even lonelier child, but the movie’s purpose is a tribute to the classic arcade games so fondly remembered by Generation X-ers and early Y-ers, who flocked to this movie in droves with a nostalgic reverence seldom paid to cartoons.

            Disney, of course, has tried this before. In 1988 Disney (through the Touchstone label) reached outside of its copyright domain and saluted not only its own golden age but that of all animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Disney’s stable (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy) appeared alongside Warner’s gang (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Tweety) and even Tex Avery’s Droopy made an appearance as the M-G-M cast was transitioning ownership into Warner’s hands, though Tom and Jerry remained off limits. This all the more amazing considering that Disney’s rivalry with Warner Bros. was much sharper then (even though some of the Warner cartoon compilations played on the Disney Channel around this time) and subsided only when Disney found a fiercer competitor with DreamWorks (though, again, that didn’t prevent songs from the Shrek soundtrack from playing on Radio Disney).

            Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a triumph artistically, creatively, and in its revival of interest in the great cartoons of the past. Wreck-It Ralph is a far more modest success done on a smaller scale, but the concept is the same.  A hodge-podge of vintage video game characters serve as backdrops to the story of Ralph (John C. Reilly), a big lonely lug fed up with life as a video game villain. Who could blame him? For thirty years he’s played foil to Fix-It Felix, Jr. (Jack McBrayer), the hero of an arcade game bearing his own name which is about 80% Donkey Kong (right down to Ralph’s resemblance to the big ape with his oversized hands, bare feet, and bulging biceps) and 20% Wrecking Crew, the early Mario game.

            What Ralph wrecks, Felix fixes, but why should the hero get all the praise? Where would Felix be, after all, if Ralph never gave him something to fix? Without a livelihood and without a game says Ralph and he has a point as was proven in the Disneyland episode “Our Unsung Villains” where the Magic Mirror explained how dull a hero’s life would be without a villain giving them their claim to fame.

            Ralph’s colleagues feel his pain. They meet in the Pac-Man console where they discuss the virtues of being bad. There are a lot of familiar faces here including Bowser from the Mario games, Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog, and Zangief from Street Fighter. Not one of them, however, wishes to be anything other than bad and are shocked when Ralph reveals his intention to be good guy for a day.

            The ingenuity of Wreck-It Ralph is in how it establishes airtight laws for the video game universe, which all play into the story. For starters, characters programmed to be bad guys like Ralph cannot win medals and in his world. However, since medals are a token of heroism Ralph vows to win one, but to do so he must sneak into another game. But game hopping or going “turbo”, as it is called by characters, is frowned upon here. Nonetheless, Ralph is determined to prove himself and sneaks into a dark and foreboding combat game called Hero’s Duty (a stand-in for the Call of Duty franchise) where he battles an army of Cy-Bugs, ugly winged boogers that devour everything in sight and could ravage the whole arcade if let out of their own game. The stakes are high for Ralph because, you see, we are told (by Sonic the Hedgehog himself in PSA) that if a character dies outside of their own game they can never be regenerated. But, against the odds, Ralph does find his medal only to wind up in an escape pod and is shuttled to a garishly colorful game called Sugar Rush, a tacky kart racing game set in a candy land.

            New rules are put in place here when the movie finds its heart in Ralph’s friendship with Vanellope von Shweetz (Sarah Silverman), a tiny racer shunned in her own world. Her dreams are simply to race with the other sugar-coated children of the kingdom but is disallowed to so by King Candy (Alan Tudyk), the land’s doofus despot. Vanellope is a glitch (meaning she pixelates) and was never intended to be a part of the game, or so the king says. If she races and wins, she will be added to the game’s regular roster of racers. Gamers will take her pixelating as a sign that the game is broken, the game will be unplugged, and the cast of Sugar Rush will be left homeless. Vanellope will suffer the most as glitches cannot escape their game, and so she will perish along with Sugar Rush.

            There is precedent for this which explains the meaning of “going turbo”. In the early years of the arcade there was a popular racing game featuring a megalomaniac driver named Turbo who could not take being eclipsed by a newer game and so hopped into the new games world causing it to glitch, resulting in the retirement of both games.

            By the end of Wreck-It Ralph we see why these rules were set in place and how they serve the story. They are bound to be of interest to thoughtful gamers who have often philosophized about the laws of the worlds they master by remote. To some degree, Wreck-It Ralph answers their questions. Game characters, as theorized in the movie, live a repetitive life coasting between free will and controlled movement. Their memories depend on the programmer’s imagination and can always pop back to life so long as they die within their own game. What happens to characters that manage to escape unplugged games? Most end up homeless and hungry begging at Game Central, a video game hub modeled on Grand Central where assorted game creations cross paths on a daily commute. Among the abandoned are Q*Bert and friends who replaced Dig Dug as homeless beggars at the station when Namco refused to allow Dug to be depicted as a has-been. Also seen are Frogger, Paperboy, and Charley Chuck. Nintendo’s Mario was also set for a cameo but was cut from the final film when a spot worthy of his stature in the gaming world could not be found.

            “The hard thing was, we were trying to work out the right way to use a character like Mario,” said Disney producer Clark Spencer. “It had to be organic to the film. We didn’t want to just paste him in there. For Bowser, it made perfect sense for him to be a member of the Bad Anon group. For Mario himself we couldn’t think of the right way to incorporate him into the film, and so we didn’t do it.” 

            The Italian plumber was, then, only mentioned as an expected guest at Felix’s thirtieth anniversary bash (and a super mushroom pops up later on) while Sega icon Sonic makes scattered appearances throughout the film. As in Roger Rabbit, these cameos aren’t really functional to the story but as distractions for a demographic they are on target. Wreck-It Ralph can get away with gimmickry because there is substance behind the style. 

            At its heart is the friendship between Ralph and Vanellope, tow outcasts who meet and find a use for each other. Ralph’s story alone is worth mentioning if only because it is a classical underdog story. When Ralph leaves the game to prove himself, Felix and the other Nicelanders (as they are called) soon realize the importance of a bad guy.

            The message is vintage Disney. Outcasts discover how important they are simply by being themselves, though one could argue that it’s possible to take it from another angle and think of the message is an advertisement for complacency; accept and don’t challenge the label bestowed upon you by society. But Ralph can’t change what he was programmed to be any more than a human can change their appearance. But we can all do good and Ralph does so by his new friend.

            Working in the world of video games gave the Disney animators a diverse range of backdrops and an army of characters creations to work with (there was a record-breaking tally of 188 character designs). Many of these came pre-designed, of course, but those in the forefront, while certainly inspired from alternative sources, are ingenious creations. Ralph is a loveable big lug, brutish in appearance but with a heart as big as his height. Felix is a subtle attack on the infallible hero. He never cusses or becomes more than cross and his physical incapability of doing wrong comes as something of a curse at times. Even the Nicelanders are a curious combination between classic 8-bit game models and the Fisher Price Little People toys from the 60s (which, incidentally, have licensed Disney characters for a playsets). Their legs too short to walk, they hop up and down building stairs and around the town. In the conceptual stages the animators considered animating the whole movie in the style of an 8-bit game, but found this too complicated and softened the look of the characters while keeping their movements grounded to the style of classic arcades.

            Not surprisingly, the best creations are the villains. Sugar Rush is policed by two badge-wearing donuts and their pack of devil dogs. King candy’s subjects are talking candies with dotted eyes and small mouths, true to their design’s probable Japanese origin. The king’s lackey is a glum green ball known as Sour Bill with disconnected hands and feet, but candy himself is the film’s most surprising pleasure. A flamboyant but bullying elf king, Candy was designed by animator Zach Parrish as a darker, more sinister, twin of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, complete with a pink bulbous nose and receding gray hair. But the real stunner is voice actor Alan Tudyk who brings the character to life as if he were simultaneously channeling Ed Wynn.

            Wreck-It Ralph is a slight film and it seems deliberate. It’s as if Disney doesn’t yet trust itself handling CGI without Pixar’s help and so works on a smaller scale. But it is a lot of fun and has moments as poignant as any Disney has done lately, mostly involving Ralph and Vanellope. Disney has always had an affinity for bratty misunderstood children and Vanellope von Shweetz is part of the tradition. As is often the case in Disney it takes a child-like adult to reach out to such a child and Ralph fills the bill.

            If there is one area in which Wreck-It Ralph provides Disney with a unique opportunity it’s in its broad assortment of settings. From the starry city where Ralph and Felix play to the apocalyptic wasteland of Hero’s Duty to the bright and colorful confections of Sugar Rush, the animators have three eye-popping canvases to for their talents.