Wreck-It Ralph

"Development hell" is Hollywood shorthand for a movie that, for various reasons, takes a long time to get made. It can be a bit of a misnomer, given that at times, the extended gestation period can actually benefit the movie's quality exponentially, whether it's because the filmmaking technology catches up to the writers' lofty visions, or whether it's because the general audience's sensibility has aligned itself with what the filmmakers put on the screen.

In the case of the recent animated film Wreck-It Ralph, which has apparently been in one form of development or another at Walt Disney studios since the 1980s, "development hell" has been anything but a four-letter word, considering that the film has opened to glowing reviews and box-office success.

WIR is the story of a video game villain, the title character, Ralph (John C. Reilly) who, after 30 years of being the bad guy is basically suffering an existential crisis. He inhabits a world where video games are basically interconnected worlds, and the characters, when they're not busy during the day living out the games, interact just like regular folk. Ralph even attends a support group for video game villains. Because of his status as a villain, Ralph is treated as something of an outsider in the game he inhabits, "Fix-It-Felix Jr.," while the game's hero, Felix (Jack McBrayer) is regularly feted by the rest of the game inhabitants. Longing to improve his lot in life, Ralph leaves his game and enters another, "Hero's Duty" looking to gain a medal (the prize of that game) and therefore acceptance. Things, however, do not turn out as Ralph plans, and through a series of events beyond his control he ends up in yet another game, the go-kart racing adventure Sugar Rush, where he meets Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) a young racer who, like Ralph, is a bit of an outsider in her game and who seeks to change her fate as well. Not only that, but events have been set in motion that threaten not only the Sugar Rush game, but every single game in the arcade. With the help of Vanellope, Felix and the tough-as-nails protagonist from "Hero's Duty," Sargeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch) Ralph will soon learn what it really means to be a hero.

Cartoon characters with existential crises have been done many times before (the Toy Story films, Ratatouille) as have films centered around the bad guys (Despicable Me, Megamind), but setting the story in a world of video games was a clever twist that opened up a lot of very interesting visual opportunities, which Disney exploited quite cleverly. First, there was the contrast between the old games and the new, and I chuckled at the 80s and 90s references to actual video games, as well as the fact that the "old" game characters were depicted with cruder graphics and animation than their much newer counterparts. Had this film been made when it was first conceived, the 1980s, apart from missing out on such cutting-edge animation technology, it would not have been able to cash in on the sense of nostalgia that pervades the film.

Second, and more significantly, the rendering of the video game landscapes, particularly in the case of "Hero's Duty" and "Sugar Rush" was nothing less than absolutely breathtaking. The "Hero's Duty" scenes are relatively, regrettably brief, but they hint at what a full-length movie based on gritty space combat games like "Starcraft" or "HALO" might look like. The "Sugar Rush" scenes, in contrast, take up a healthy chunk of the movie's running time, but are no less meticulously rendered. The highlights of these magnificent, candy-coated set pieces are, quite easily, the racing scenes, which to my mind are the race scenes that the makers of box-office bomb Speed Racer wish they could have put on the screen. Again, had this movie come out at around the time of the first Tron movie, the only movie of that era to feature video game characters as protagonists, it would most likely have suffered a similar fate at the box-office.

No matter how handsome the presentation, though, this film would not get very far without some good old-fashioned heart, and I'm happy to say that Wreck-It Ralph has plenty of that, along with a thoroughly likeable and even relatable protagonist in the eternally frustrated Ralph, who isn't unlike Tom Hanks' Woody from Toy Story or Craig T. Nelson's Bob Parr in The Incredibles in terms of some very human frailty.

It's not an absolutely perfect film; I wasn't too impressed with the fact that a lot of the banter between Vanellope and Ralph consisted of toilet gags done over and over, and there were some gaps in logic that felt a little jarring at some points. Such, I think, is the nature of creating a world that has its own set of rules, as was the case in the Toy Story films; too often the writers run afoul of their world's internal logic. Why, for example, don't Ralph and Felix have the same jerky movement as the rest of the characters in their game? Still, it's nothing as egregious as Buzz Lightyear believing himself to be alive and yet freezing whenever a human being shows up in the first Toy Story movie. This movie is a magnificent experience, and considering the eye-popping colors on display I'm glad I skipped the 3-D presentation; whatever the extra-dimension had to offer, it would not have been worth losing a bit of those wonderful colors!

Disney Animation has pulled off a bit of an anomaly this year; they've crafted a movie that has garnered better reviews than the product of their esteemed colleagues at Pixar!

4.5/5