Earnest and typecast, Ralph introduces himself as a “bad guy” during a Bad-Anon meeting, where “One game at a time” is the mantra to move through life as a video game villain. Set in a Toy Story-like world where video game characters lead their own lives out of the control of quarter-pumping game fanatics as soon as the arcade closes, Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph is brilliant film about the dangers of typecasting and profiling.
In an arcade replete with games that span decades, Ralph is the villain of Fix It Felix, a Donkey Kong like-game wherein Felix (voiced by Jack McBriar) attempts to repair an apartment building that crumbles under the force of Ralph’s smashing on the roof. Each window that breaks, each brick that cracks, each door that falls from its hinges is fixed with a touch of Felix’s golden hammer. Even though Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) is simply doing his job, he is relegated to the dump after the arcade closes while the building’s tenants, Felix, and other video game good guys travel via shuttles running through power cords and surge protectors to live it up in the penthouse.
As they dance, drink, and eat cake, each movement reminds us of 16-bit consoles like the embryonic Sega and Nintendo of the early 1980’s. Felix and his crew move at right angles, their legs cleanly separate and come back together when they jump in profile a la Mario, and their staccato movements recreate the choppiness of Zelda, Metroid, or the famous plumbers.
There are also flashes of next-generation consoles with cameos by Sonic the Hedgehog,who warns us “If you die outside of your own game, you don’t regenerate…ever.” This becomes important as Ralph tries to prove that he can be a good guy. Making a bet that he can win a medal and thus be admitted to the party, Ralph leaves his game and enters a first-person shooter game reminiscent of Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, and their ilk. Here, he makes his way to the upper floor of a skyscraper overrun with alien insects, capturing the coveted medal. At the same time, his inexperience allows a cybug (a virus) to escape the game with him, sending them via shuttle through various cables and eventually into Sugar Rush, a game that can only be described as the progeny of Candy Land and Super Mario Cart.
In this land, he encounters the precocious Vanellope (voiced by Sarah Silverman), a capricious imp prohibited from racing because she is a glitch, a dangerous entity that – if she’s allowed to cross the finish line – will destroy the game, causing it to become “Out of Order” and bringing about the destruction and death of every character within.
The dialog between the two outliers is pithy, clever, and pun-filled. It is also genuinely endearing.
Most of all, their connection as the ostracized creates an additional play on things being “Out of Order.” In each video game, no matter the decade, no matter the quality of graphics, exists an “us versus them” mentality. The bad guys must be bad for the good to be good. This is a simple assessment of video games in general, but there’s a truth. Good stems from the recognition of bad. And often, bad is a result of the unusual or those deemed improper, impure, or unusual. Ralph is gargantuan and akin to a caveman with rage issues; Vanellope is runty and a flickering glitch; Sargeant Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) fights aliens because she has been “programmed with a tragic backstory.” In a sense, Calhoun is the most satirical lens offered on society. She is a constructed history personified, and she’s leading the charge, much like the personified surge protectors (the men standing at the entry point to other video game cables meeting in the Grand Central Surge Protector) randomly checks the bad guys as they enter a public area.
Wreck-It Ralph is fun, entertaining, visually stunning, and exciting. It’s also a parable on our perceptions of good, bad, the military, bullying, and ethnocentrism. It’s adult and it’s juvenile; most of all, it’s worth viewing.
