If you know anything at all about Wreck-It Ralph, Disney’s latest animated film, you know that it’s an homage to classic videogames. The eponymous main character is an archetypal action game “bad guy,” and the twist is that when the lights go out in the ’80s arcade he calls home, he dreams of being good.
This could all have gone horribly wrong. Ralph could have been filled with cheap gags about old games written by people who don’t particularly like or care about old games, having fun at the expense of a subculture instead of celebrating it. Characters would say things like, “I’m gonna control-alt-delete you!” or “Oof! That hit me right in the pixels!”
Conversely, Wreck-It Ralph could have been written by people who were desperately in love with early videogames, a cross-over fanfiction writer’s dream, in which every game character from every universe gets to interact: Donkey Kong drives the car from Pole Position with John Madden riding shotgun and a beaker of Red Potion in the cup holder. The license plate number is the code to skip right to Mike Tyson.
This, too, would have been a disaster. Nerds would high-five and cry nerd tears and nobody else would get it.
What actually happened with Wreck-It Ralph, which hits theaters on Nov. 2, was an expert-level threading of the needle. It does have references to classic games, many of them, pulled from several different makers’ biggest titles: Super Mario, Pac-Man, Street Fighter. There are hidden supernerd references (“Aerith Lives” is scrawled in graffiti on a subway wall).
But man, the nerd references are great while they last. In one of the early expository scenes, Ralph attends a “Bad-Anon” meeting. Super Mario’s arch-enemy Bowser sits next to him and doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to; seeing the giant lizard holding a tiny Styrofoam cup of coffee is funny in and of itself. One of the bad guys from the far more obscure Altered Beast is sitting in the therapy circle too. That even went over my head. It’s subtle and under the radar, not in your face.
As these gags become fewer and far between, we get to enjoy the movie’s original characters. It’s hard not to form an instant emotional connection with Ralph, played by John C. Reilly, because John C. Reilly has a face that just makes you want to hug him and tell him everything’s going to be OK. This carries over into his performance as Ralph. Who among us has not at times felt like the big oaf ruining everything, desperate to be liked but turning people away when you overdo it?
Jane Lynch, the only reason I can get through episodes of Glee, is of course perfect for the role of the female PG-rated version of Full Metal Jacket’ s drill sergeant.
I understand that this feeling of dread will get much, much worse when I tell you that the name of the character is “Vanellope Von Schweetz.”
As it turns out, the friendship between Ralph and Vanellope is the film’s emotional linchpin. The two actors recorded their lines together and were given leave to ad-lib and improvise in those sessions, resulting in some surprisingly funny exchanges, not forced wisecracks. It works better than you’d expect. The film is the most important thing, not the celebrities doing the voices.
Thanks largely to its close integration with Pixar and John Lasseter, Disney is fully out of the Brother Bear – Treasure Planet funk. 2010’s Tangled , I would say, is up there with The Little Mermaid on the quality scale. I would like to think that even as a total sucker for videogame references I have enough perspective to say that Wreck-It Ralph is not quite at that level: The jokes aren’t quite as gut-busting, the story twists are not quite as unexpected, the characters not quite as timeless.
But I also think that it will be seen as a very, very good all-ages film, not because of the gaming references but because it deliberately pulls back on them before they’ve overstayed their welcome, replacing them with a surprisingly well-played story of how a person can find redemption in the least expected places. It hit me right in the pixels.
