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Wreck-It Ralph

Wreck-It Ralph

The easy sell is it's Toy Story but with video games.

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The brilliance of this movie, part road trip, part nostalgic gaming-fest, is that it doesn't feel either a dumbed down version of that movie, or a rip-off of its concept. The jokes may be skewed younger and lack that consistent duality to include both kids and adults that's the mark of a great Pixar flick, but there's a depth to Ralph's story and arc that outweighs his 2D origins.

In Toy Story it's a kid's bedroom, here it's an arcade hall at night, with casts from every cabinet in the place intermingling between opening hours, switching locations via power leads and multi-plug sockets, the crossover junction point realised as a gaming version of New York's Central Station.

We take this journey with Ralph, a Donkey Kong-analogue who spends the day bashing residental buildings and ultimately being toppled every time a coin is fired into the cabinet by Fix It Felix Jr., the earnest Mario-a-like. Ralph's eager for change from being the bad guy and acceptance from those he terrorises as part of the day job. So he hatches a plan to win a medal from another arcade game... and ends up drawing together a disparate set of characters and having (as these things go) to accept who he is while cleaning up the wreck he's managed to makes in the process.

Despite the cameo-rich first act, the movie only fleetingly dabbles with famous characters (mainly as a fantastic self-help group for bad guys, and pause-or-you'll-miss-them crowd shots in Central Station). But the core cast that join Ralph and the worlds travelled to are too well cut from the archetypes of gaming genres and characters. However, you can tell Disney have done their homework in pre-production (note the third act climax that echoes Final Fantasy boss fights).

But this is still typical Disney, and with the company wary of alienating any audience member during the running time, it plays convention (and in-jokes) in broad strokes, and the movie dips come the middle act as Ralph spends his time in the Mario Kart-style game of Sugar Rush and the gaming elements are stripped back even further. But come the end of a gaming montage credits sequence, the movie's managed to win you over.

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Wreck-It Ralph
SPECIAL FEATURES: The fifteen minute Making Of documentary dedicates most of its time to the principal cast's creation and the design of the different game worlds, with nothing mentioned of the movie cameos. A missed opportunity. A trio of fake ads for the arcade games is fun, but the highlight is excellent animated short Paperman.
08 Gamereactor UK
8 / 10
overall score
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