Itmay have taken three months to land on these shores – what is it about Disneyfilms taking ages to cross the pond ala ‘The Muppets’, it’s no wonder piracy isrife – but my excitement for ‘Wreck It Ralph’ has not faded. Telling the storyof Ralph, the baddy in an arcade game called ‘Fix It Felix Jr’ – think classicarcade game ‘Donkey Kong’ – who is tired of the same day-in day-out treatmentof being the villain, getting thrown off a building, and living in a dump,whilst the hero gets the medal and the admiration. On the day of the game’s 30thanniversary Ralph decides to change his life and win a medal to fulfil a betwith one of the inhabitants of the game so he can live in the plush penthouse.He finds himself across the arcade, via a train-station like portal for arcadecharacters, entering a game called ‘Heroes Duty’ where he wins the medal butends up in another game entitled ‘Sugar Rush’, where he meets one of thecharacters in there and their adventure together snowballs to the filmsconclusion, bringing the cast together against two disparate threats.
Iwas looking forward to this film and had high hopes for it but, unlike lastyear’s ‘Looper’ or ‘The Avengers Assemble’ which I was equally excited for butultimately found disappointing, this lived up to my expectations and surpassedthem. This is by far the best animated film I’ve seen since the brilliant ‘CloudyWith A Chance of Meatballs’ or anything by Aardman and is a joy to watch.
Forsomeone like me, who played classic 8-bit games as a young child, ‘Wreck ItRalph’ is a feast for the eyes, with more cameos of classic gaming charactersthan you can count – look Sonic! Dig Dug! Pacman! – and an eye for detail thatis amazing. The way the characters move in the film captures their respectivegaming styles perfectly and all the codes, conventions and tropes of the eraare captured in celluloid perfectly.
Fromthe 8-bit games the characters move in jerky fashion, all at right-angles, andin the more modern ones, a spot-on parody of all the modern X-Box shoot-em-ups,realistically done with hilarious phrases and mixed metaphors, with the head of‘Heroes Duty’ being one of my favourite in the film. The characters also oftenadapt to the games they are in in graphical style which was a great idea, andthe music also fits in with the 8-bit style. Everything in the film seems togel together so well.
Theopening ten-minutes, which establishes the games, the universe and thealcoholic-anonymous-esque bad-guys meeting, is some of the best animation andhumour you’ll see in ages. Where the opening to ‘Up’ was the best first tenminutes of a CGI film ever for pulling at your heart-strings, this is the samebut with jokes.
Thefilm is perhaps at its strongest at the start and never quite recaptures thatopening magic but the interaction between the characters all the way through isexcellent. The film only really dips when the character of Venelope Von Schweetappears, voiced by and clearly modelled on Sarah Silverman. She’s meant to beintentionally annoying and she succeeds. I don’t like Silverman as a comedianand this transfers into the film, and her lines in the script are often at oddswith the more intelligent and fun humour scattered through the rest of the film.A good toilet joke is fun in a film but her elements of the script do this toooften and is the only negative I can find in the film, especially when there’san awkward one-minute segment of her taking the mickey out of the title ‘HeroesDuty’ in American (“Dooty”) as slang for poo, something that doesn’tparticularly translate well over to this country.
However,her character does redeem herself and by the end transforms into a morepleasant character.
‘WreckIt Ralph’ is a must-see film especially if you have a love for classic videogames. The amount of cameos makes it a must-see-again film and the interactionbetween the characters is perfect in their styles. Plus, a film that makesjokes out of poor AI in games, programming glitches, the clichés of bothretro and modern titles, and captures the style of so many differentconventions so perfectly, is well worth viewing.
Thestrongest CGI film since ‘Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs’, ‘Wreck It Ralph’is my favourite film in a long time full of the little touches that make a filmreally good and worth watching again. It does perhaps take a dip mid-waythrough and shouldn’t have cheapened itself with some of the toilet-humour, butit was a delight to watch and there was a permanent smile etched on my facethroughout the running time.
Plus,the preceding short ‘Paperman’ was a thing of wonder too.
WreckIt Ralph: 9/10
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