A Toy Story for gamers
Disney takes another journey into the secret life of playthings
Wreck-It Ralph 1/2 Starring: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch Directed by: Rich Moore Running time: 95 minutes Parental guidance: G Playing at: at South Common, Galaxy, North Common, Scotiabank, Windermere, Clareview, City Centre, Spruce Grove, Grandin, Leduc
Remember those great old video games of the 1980s — the busy Marios and the hungry Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, and that bar called Tapper where patrons had to be served in a hurry?
Those were the thrilling days of eight-bit computer graphics, blocky characters and innocent fantasy. It is an era evoked in Wreck-It Ralph, a sort of Toy Story for the online generation: a 3-D, computer-generated animated comedy that’s a combination of Tron and Candy Land.
Of course, if you remember Pac-Man, you may be too old for Wreck-It Ralph, which is just one of the delightful puzzles of this tribute to the arcade. When someone calls Pac-Man “that cherry-chasing dot-muncher,” you trust that the over-30s will laugh with nostalgia and the under-10s will laugh because that’s just what they do, especially when 3-D glasses are involved.
In many ways, it’s brilliant. Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) is the villain in an old-school game called Fix-It Felix Jr., a sort of Donkey Kong knock-off in which Ralph — a giant with immense fists — smashes an apartment building to pieces. Then Felix (Jack McBrayer) comes in with his magic hammer to repair the damage and run up points. It’s exactly the sort of thing that cost many youngsters their allowance, not to mention their time, and it’s a tribute to the film’s gamesmanship that the Walt Disney Company has now put a real Fix-It Felix Jr. game online. Hide your children.
But Ralph doesn’t want to be a bad guy, as he tells his support group, Bad-Anon, whose members include the likes of the Pac-Man ghost and Zangief from Street Fighter. Ralph wants to be a hero, so he migrates to other games in the arcade, looking for a new life.
It’s a hunt that takes him into the bits and bytes of the secret arcade life, when figures come to life after hours and get together for a pint — at Tappers — and a few yuks. Director Rich Moore creates an ingenious universe of ones and zeros and a culture of several video games, each with clever designs and funny characters in the real — i.e. fake — world of gaming. Just like Woody and Buzz Lightyear evoked toys that seemed more real than those that actually existed, so the Wreck-It Ralph world gives us games that seem too authentic not to be true.
Ralph’s first excursion is into a first-person war game where he dresses up as a storm trooper — under the command of a hilariously macho commander (Jane Lynch), who says things like, “Flattery doesn’t charge these batteries, civilian” — and finds a hero’s medal that will (just like it did for The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz) attest to his good-guy status.
He then flies into Sugar Rush, a child’s adventure that takes place in a landscape of gumdrops, chocolate lakes and perilous Nesquik-sand. There, he joins forces with little Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), a girl with the eyes of a Walter Keane drawing and the attitude of, well, Sarah Silverman. Vanellope has troubles of her own: the ruler of Sugar Rush, King Candy (Alan Tudyk, a Mad Hatter with the voice of an ersatz Ed Wynn), has turned her into an electronic glitch that keeps spritzing energy: she’s a ball of sweet static, and only Ralph can save her.
Racing around this world of syrup and falling Mentos, Wreck-It Ralph takes on a sort of sticky sweetness of its own, a feeling that even Reilly’s tousled Everyman exasperation can’t totally erase. It’s both energized and cloying, with no real emotion.
Its Disney tropes — a big race that must be won, a destiny that turns on being yourself — diminish the brilliant conception of its central idea and the genius of its design. You wonder how they think of these things, and why they can’t do something better with them. You also wonder if you should download a Fix-It Felix Jr. game, because you have a couple of hours to kill.