After an extended period at college, it’s good to go home and take a break. On my first night of Spring break, I decide to watch my favorite Disney movie of the past 10 years. For people who know me, Lilo & Stitch came out in 2002, so we’re good. I ordered the DVD and accidentally had it sent to my home address, so this was my face when I came home and saw the DVD in my house.
Wreck-It Ralph is Disney’s 52nd animated film, and their fifth CGI animated one. (Can you name the others? Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, and Tangled). The original story was written in the 1980s (so… Pong and Pacman would be the only characters?) and then rewritten in the 90s. Finally, the script was settled on, and the cast was signed on. The story is basically the Toy Story of videogames. Within our reality, there is a world where videogames characters are conscious beings who live entire lives behind our backs. At night, when the arcade closes, all of the videogame characters get to interact, explore other worlds, and question their existence. Ralph, played by John C. Reilly, or:
So Ralph comes from the game Fix-It Felix. Voiced by the amazing Jack McBrayer.
The game is simple, Wreck-It Ralph destroys a building, and the player fixes it with Felix’s magic hammer. The movie starts on the day of Fix-It Felix’s 30th anniversary as a game. All of the characters are excited, except Ralph, who the citizens of the game despise for being a villain. Motivated by his insistance on proving his worth, Ralph leaves his game to go to a Halo/Call of Duty type game, Hero’s Duty, to win a medal for being a hero. That’s where he meets Sergeant Calhoun, played by Jane Lynch.
After basically destroying the game, Ralph manages to win a medal, and takes a space ship and crashes it in Sugar Rush, the Mariokart-type racing game inside an entire world of candy. There, he meets Vanellope von Schweetz, aka Sarah Silverman.
Vanellope is unfortunately a glitch of the game, and the ruler of her land, King Candy, refuses to allow her to race. Ralph befriends her and helps her try to win a race. Then everything goes wrong and the movie is literally amazing. This was me the whole time, because this was my second time seeing it and I knew how emotional the ending was.
The movie is not only powerful, it’s also hilarious. Here is a bitchy Sugar Rush racer trying to stop crying. It was also me the entire ending.
And even though the movie creates original videogame characters for us to relate to, it makes great, nostalgic references to ones we all know and love. Here is Q*bert being sad and Pacman gasping.
The ONLY reason this movie did not win the Academy Award for Best Picture is because the average age of the Academy member is 62, and that means they didn’t grow up playing videogames. The plot also deals a lot with code and programming (not that you need to understand either to get the movie) and I could see how it could be lost on older voters.
Despite this drawback of the Academy, the film is everything I want in a Disney movie. It’s appealing to all ages, as well as emotionally powerful. I prefer it over Brave in so many ways, and the two had a good run battling it out across award season. Wreck-It Ralph took the Annie Award, the Critics Choice, and the Producers Guild, while Brave took the biggest of the awards, the Golden Globe and the Academy Award. Despite the losses, Wreck-It Ralph has much more complexity to its plot and its resolution is so much more heart wrenching. I can’t praise it enough.
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