Rhapsodies

So I finally got around to seeing Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. I was expecting good things for the most part. While I may not have liked the works of Disney’s Digital Animation studio quite as much as I like the works of say Pixar, Bolt and Tangled were perfectly solid pieces of work so I’d be perfectly willing to watch antybesides I’d been hearing good things about it from friends of whose opinions I trust

So while I was never into video games that much. My parents were never that big on us kids wasting our allowance that way and to make matters worse I totally sucked at them, because of that the arcade scene was something was something I was only aware of at a peripheral level. Despite all this the whimsical fantasy appealed to me greatly. I decided to make it my choice of Thanksgiving viewing.

Wreck-It Ralph tells the story of a 80s video game villain who after 30 years of smashing (and being thrown off of) the same apartment is developing serious dissatisfaction with his job.

His efforts to improve his lot in life takes him to a first person shooter game called Hero’s Duty and an anime style race game called Sugar Rush. In the mean time his absence in his own game has great consequences.

I had a great time the look of the thing was fantastic each of the different game worlds Niceland, Ralphs game is starkly minimalistic consisting of only the apartment and Ralph’s dump, the Sugar Rush world has you looking into getting an insulin prescription and Hero’s duty adds yet another weapon to the arsenal for anyone who is sick to death of all of Hollywood’s endless excuses for not doing quality science fiction films.

It was the little details of the fill that appealed to me were all of the references and cameos from other games. The way the Nicelanders move in a very jerky manner compared to everyone else since they are only background figures. I almost wish they had gone further with things like this. There is a scene where Fixit Felix Jr (The hero of Ralph’s game compliments the high resolution of Calhoun (the heroine of Hero’s Duty.) As far as we the viewers are concerned, both characters have the same resolution. I doubt I would have liked to seen the “real version” of a 12 bit character but I’m sure there would have been some ways to show the difference between characters in different generations of computer animation.

It’s hard not to watch Wreck-It Ralph without thinking of Toy Story. Both films deal with our playthings do when we all go home not to mention a certain level of existential angst in there for example it’s flat out said that one of the character’s “tragic back story” has been programmed into her so you know that it never happened even before you hear what it is. Also you can’t help noticing that none of the characters in this film are unique and one wonders if the thousands of other Ralphs have the same issues that the one in the movie does. (That last one is completely irrelevant to the film just an example of a chronic nitpicker thinking way too much about a kid’s film)

All in all Wreck-It Ralph was an entertaining piece of fluff that I would recommend to anyone.