WRECK-IT RALPH

WRECK-IT RALPH is the best Disney animated feature of the last twenty years. Personally, I would double that, as the last one I loved this much was 1973’s ROBIN HOOD. It is very clever and full of little jokes and references, but doesn’t depend fully on gimmicks and in-jokes to carry it along. It is warm and funny and clever in equal measure and has a stellar voice cast.

Spoilers after the jump.

Ralph (John C. Reilly) is a bad guy, and his journey in this film is one in which he must learn to be comfortable being the villain. Not to say that he can’t be sweet, or caring, but he cannot change his programming. He is destined to be hated, and to reject that would mean his entire world being marked ‘Out of Order,’ and he and all the other denizens of the game Fix-It Felix, Jr. would be unplugged and cease to be. But he wants only to be understood, a shred of compassion, and to move out of the garbage dump he has been relegated to within his game. Every day, Ralph must smash the apartment building that has displaced his home, and every day the hero of the game, Fix-It Felix, Jr. (Jack McBrayer) undoes this damage with his magic golden hammer. The building’s tenants reward Felix with a medal at the end of each level, and punish Ralph by throwing him from the building’s roof into the mud below.

On the game’s 30^th anniversary, Ralph gets it into his head that if only he could win a medal, his fellow characters would celebrate him the way they do Felix. But because they are all so set in their ways of thinking about Ralph, he decides to hop to a different game in pursuit of a Medal of Honor. He ends up in a Call of Duty/Halo pastiche called Hero’s Duty, an intense war game with killer space bugs who take on characteristics of whatever they consume. He snags the medal, but not without upsetting the world of Hero’s Duty, and manages to escape with the medal, a space bug, and Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch) in hot pursuit of this interloper.

He crash lands in another game, this one a sweets-based racer called Sugar Rush. This is another brilliant conceit of the film; by mainly focusing on games that don’t actually exist, they are able to place the audience on equal footing, as we can all conceive of a racing game without having to know the specific references that would come from placing it in a preexisting world. Within this racing game Ralph meets Venelope von Schweets (Sarah Silverman), a glitch who wants only to be recognized as an actual character and a natural born racer, even if she has yet to ever drive a car. She is able to enter the qualifying race only with a gold coin, which Ralph’s medal resembles enough to fool the machine.

Weaved within the story are a sea of video game references which are always allowed to exist in the background but never necessary to decode in order to enjoy the film. If you know who Walter Day is, then you will smile whenever Ed O’Neil’s character Mr. Litwak is onscreen. If you don’t, it detracts absolutely zero from the experience. Similarly there are some 8-bit jokes, such as the jerky movements of the smoothly animated tenants of Felix’s neighbors, which are allowed to exist as bonus jokes on top of the surface jokes. Nothing kills a background joke faster than relegating it to the foreground. (As an example, see The Simpsons - once the king of quick, pause-it-or-you’ll-miss-it style jokes they have long since abandoned that and taken to holding on such jokes until even the most dyslexic among us have read them twice.) There are many scenes, mostly within the surge protector that acts as a hub between games, which will require pausing and dissecting once WRECK-IT RALPH hits DVD.

Really an awesome picture -- an awesome weekend for movies, honestly. This past month has proven really rewarding for cinema goers. Be sure to stay for the end credits, which include a Buckner & Garcia anthem to Wreck-It Ralph for added verisimilitude, and a kill screen. Craftsmanship like this deserves your patronage.