It may have taken three months to land on these shores – what is it about Disney films taking ages to cross the pond ala ‘The Muppets’, it’s no wonder piracy is rife – but my excitement for ‘Wreck It Ralph’ has not faded. Telling the story of Ralph, the baddy in an arcade game called ‘Fix It Felix Jr’ – think classic arcade game ‘Donkey Kong’ – who is tired of the same day-in day-out treatment of 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 bet with 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 arcade characters, entering a game called ‘Heroes Duty’ where he wins the medal but ends up in another game entitled ‘Sugar Rush’, where he meets one of the characters in there and their adventure together snowballs to the films conclusion, bringing the cast together against two disparate threats.
I was looking forward to this film and had high hopes for it but, unlike last year’s ‘Looper’ or ‘The Avengers Assemble’ which I was equally excited for but ultimately found disappointing, this lived up to my expectations and surpassed them. This is by far the best animated film I’ve seen since the brilliant ‘Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs’ or anything by Aardman and is a joy to watch.
For someone like me, who played classic 8-bit games as a young child, ‘Wreck It Ralph’ is a feast for the eyes, with more cameos of classic gaming characters than you can count – look Sonic! Dig Dug! Pacman! – and an eye for detail that is amazing. The way the characters move in the film captures their respective gaming styles perfectly and all the codes, conventions and tropes of the era are captured in celluloid perfectly.
From the 8-bit games the characters move in jerky fashion, all at right-angles, and in 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 often adapt to the games they are in in graphical style which was a great idea, and the music also fits in with the 8-bit style. Everything in the film seems to gel together so well.
The opening ten-minutes, which establishes the games, the universe and the alcoholic-anonymous-esque bad-guys meeting, is some of the best animation and humour you’ll see in ages. Where the opening to ‘Up’ was the best first ten minutes of a CGI film ever for pulling at your heart-strings, this is the same but with jokes.
The film is perhaps at its strongest at the start and never quite recaptures that opening magic but the interaction between the characters all the way through is excellent. The film only really dips when the character of Venelope Von Schweet appears, voiced by and clearly modelled on Sarah Silverman. She’s meant to be intentionally annoying and she succeeds. I don’t like Silverman as a comedian and this transfers into the film, and her lines in the script are often at odds with 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 too often and is the only negative I can find in the film, especially when there’s an awkward one-minute segment of her taking the mickey out of the title ‘Heroes Duty’ in American (“Dooty”) as slang for poo, something that doesn’t particularly translate well over to this country.
However, her character does redeem herself and by the end transforms into a more pleasant character.
‘Wreck It Ralph’ is a must-see film especially if you have a love for classic video games. The amount of cameos makes it a must-see-again film and the interaction between the characters is perfect in their styles. Plus, a film that makes jokes out of poor AI in games, programming glitches, the clichés of both retro and modern titles, and captures the style of so many different conventions so perfectly, is well worth viewing.
The strongest 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 film really good and worth watching again. It does perhaps take a dip mid-way through and shouldn’t have cheapened itself with some of the toilet-humour, but it was a delight to watch and there was a permanent smile etched on my face throughout the running time.
Plus, the preceding short ‘Paperman’ was a thing of wonder too.
Wreck It Ralph: 9/10
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