Wreck-It Ralph, Movie Review

"I am bad, but that's good.  I will never be good, and that's not bad.  There's no one I'd rather be then me."

Rating: 4 Stars out of 5

Ralph is an 8-bit game villain who has been terrorizing the small towns apartment building for 30 long years, and he's tired of it.  What glory is there in being the bad guy?  No one likes you.  No one ever wants you around.  If you're bad in the game, then you must be bad in your personal life as well, right?  That's what all the other game characters think, and Ralph is tired of being treated as trash, and sleeping on bricks.  Never mind the fact that he's never been invited to a party or eaten cake.  He wants to change this, but will he go "turbo?"

In all honesty I would give this movie a 3.75, but clever fun ideas, and the animated short that takes place before the film, bumps the movie experience to a 4.  Paperman is the animated short, a solid 5 out of 5 stars, and is simply the most brilliant animated short I've ever seen.  I don't want to give any of it away, only that I loved every moment.  I can go on and on about what I think about it, but go see Wreck-it Ralph, and you can judge for yourself what you think of Paperman.  It's so good.

The actual film, Wreck-it Ralph, was very entertaining, and original!  How often do we get anything original out of Hollywood these days?  Um, practically never.  Everything now is a remake, prequel, sequel, or based off of a book.  This movie is none of that, though we do get a lot of video game cameos.     


As reported by Total Film, they asked Disney Producer Clark Spencer how they went about getting all those cameos (and there are a lot . . . it was fun geeking out, recognizing random characters):

"We talked early on about making the film authentic and the only way to do that was to have real game characters in the film as well as the characters we'd created, otherwise it would feel like an artificial environment.  But when you do that, you don't know the reality of what characters you're going to be able to license for the film.  Rich [Moore, director] and I went to E3, and pitched the movie to all the different game companies, talking about the concept.  What was great about that was we developed a one-on-one relationship [with the people at the game companies], and people warmed to the idea.  So they felt like it could be something interesting, but they were still a little skeptical, as they were giving their own creative characters over to Wreck-It Ralph.  And so we said we'd keep them involved in the process, and give them the script pages. We showed them the models, we showed them the early animation tests, and even the final animations.  We brought them along the entire way, and it made companies willing to participate, because they felt like we were going to be true to their characters.  As a result we got pretty much almost anything we wanted, because the companies started feeling the momentum and everybody pretty much said yes to us."

Where the film went wrong with the pacing in the middle act.  The beginning and the end of the movie flows nicely, but the middle dragged on a little, and as much as I like Sugar Rush--a cutesy Japanese style, super Kawaii, go-kart game--there was just a little too much Sugar Rush in the movie.

Overall I found the movie quite fun, and the animation was just brilliant.  I loved all the different styles and details.  For instance the Wreck-it Ralph townspeople are very jumpy in their movements, which is key-frame animation without tweening (thank you Steven for the vocab), representing their 8-bit roots.  I asked Steven why Ralph and Fix-it Felix, Jr. were so smooth compared with the rest of their game, and he said that in animation all key characters, objects, building, etc, are called Hero's (even if you're a villain), and they receive special attention, detail, and time.  

I did enjoy this movie and recommend it, and you get a fantastic animated short in the process.