Wreck-It Ralph - Movie Review

Wreck-It Ralph is a movie about an 8-bit antagonist who is tired of being the bad guy. He wants to be the praised hero that the kids love. To achieve that he needs to travel to other arcade games, like a sugar coated racetrack and a bug contaminated gritty world.

The movie is Disney's try to create a similar experience to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and the "Toy Story-Films" for the rich world of Gaming. I'm a gamer myself and was quite skeptical if it would succeed with such classics. The expectations for it are high enough, so hopefully it doesn't disappoint me. Read if it could meet my expectations.

What's really great was about the movie was the appearance of cameos. We got Bowser, Sonic, Dr.Eggman, Zangief, Pac-Man and many more of them. Every now and then could I spot video game references, which suited the movie. I thought they could feel forced or out of place but they felt naturally. The only let down in this regard was that these focused solely on the first 20 minutes of the movie. In this regard it wasn’t an equivalent of “Who framed Roger Rabbit”. They gave away a great opportunity to make use of the rich world of videogames for the sake of their own original story.

The story of the movie couldn’t be better. We have a bad guy as the main character, which is a hit every time. Be it in games or movies. It is a lot of fun to smash thing instead of repairing them, but in the end he turns out to be the nicest of them all as it is typical for any Disney movie. What really was interesting were the great use of characters and the meaning behind their appearance. In a Pixar movie it is the case that any character that can be simplified or combined gets that treatment so only the ones that are necessary stay. That’s the reason why movies like Monster Inc works with just a few bunches. That concept is also applied here. The first time I felt it in a movie which wasn’t made by Pixar. Made the obvious relationship between Disney Animation and Pixar was the reason, but in the end the result was fantastic.

The story is peppered with many fantastic and hilariously ideas based on retro games. The joke they had were funny and witty, instead of the common slapstick and vulgar things. I watched the German version but even that one had countless plays on words. Different to many other children aimed movies this one had an intelligent story which surprised me more often than the other did. The best metaphor would be the show of a magician. He shows you his empty cylinder and then begin to focus on something different, like the spotlights to reveal a hidden rabbit in his hat. The same happened in the movie and I was flashed. Even though what happened was logical, I couldn’t think of it to happen, because they carefully slipped it under my eyes.

What was bad about the movies? Not that much to be fair. The story centered around 60% in the sugar rush land and didn’t make use of many setting and game worlds, but I didn’t feel bored being there. Perhaps the annoying little girl in the trailer? Even she wasn’t bad. Sometime she was annoying, but that was part of her character, which changed over time to a “not so annoying little girl”. What about the music, did it suck? No, not really… it wasn’t as bombastic as the one from Hans Zimmer, but it fulfilled the purposed to draw you into the specific words and not to be legendary Batman like a hero. But the story wasn’t at least unoriginal? Yes it was unoriginal. A bad guy trying to change himself to get friends is not that uncommon, but paired with the setting of games was something new, so I guess that doesn’t count either. So if nothing was bad would mean it was fantastic and that’s the case. If you watch it expect a lot, preferable from King Candy who was by far the best of the cast.