Ralph has been working in an arcade game for 30 years. He’s the villain in the arcade game “Fix-It Felix Jr.” After each workday, the celebrated Felix, after whom the game is named, receives a gold medal and universal love; Ralph, on the other hand, is shunned by everyone. The disgruntled villain, who wasn’t even invited to the anniversary celebration of his own game, sets off in search of a medal and friends in neighboring arcade machines.
The plot of “Wreck-It Ralph” seems rather simple, and the moral is familiar to cartoons aimed at preschool children: you can’t judge a game character by their programming, friendship is more important than a medal, and (this is a new obsession embedded in every “Disney” product) fate can be changed.
Moreover, at some point, the film’s action completely shifts to the sugary-sweet landscapes of a fictional game about racing on freshly baked cars, which is, of course, very beautiful, but somehow cloyingly sweet and quite childish. However, “Wreck-It Ralph” is a film where the idea turned out to be much more interesting than the plot. Its creator, Rich Moore, is not just an animation director for “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” but, first and foremost, a former kid and a person who has witnessed a whole generation of computer games change and “Pac-Man” fade into the distant past. It seems that he and a dozen other former kids seriously wondered what happened to the heroes of “Sonic” after they were retired, and “Wreck-It Ralph” is the witty fruit of their fantasies on this topic.
The Genius of “Wreck-It Ralph”
What if Pac-Man were invited to a party? What if all the main villains had a meetup? Villain therapy, by the way, is the best scene in the entire film, certainly not aimed at preschoolers, in which the bad guys from all the significant games of past years are gathered with surprising tenderness (even from the great “Mortal Kombat”). Boyishness (in its best manifestations) shines through in every tiny detail of the world of “Wreck-It Ralph.” With the enthusiasm of programmers, the authors meticulously created three completely different game realities from scratch and even came up with their own program for each character. Then they reasoned that the realities would interact, but they could not be mixed in any way, because, again, each game has its own program and its own graphics.
A Clash of Styles
As a result, a heroine from the incredibly graphic “Hero’s Duty” walks with an eight-bit Felix through the bright pink expanses of a children’s game, and this may be a little infantile, but it is certainly funny, bold, and unexpected.