As far as kids go, it’s game on
Animation powers up oversized hero in sticky-sweet world, but it lacks emotion
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, asort of Toy Story for the online generation: a 3D computer-generated animated comedy that’s a combination of Tron and Candy Land.
Of course, if you remember PacMan, 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 3D 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 games manship that the The Walt Disney Company has now put a real FixIt 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-Mang host 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 firstperson 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.
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.