Wreck-It Ralph... I saw the new animated film earlier today, and needless to say, it's another Pixar masterpiece. Wreck-It Ralph combines the awesome action sequences of 2004's The Incredibles with the heartfelt sincerity of 2001's Monsters, Inc. Like Monsters, Inc., this latest movie revolves around a character who—despite making a living out of scaring people and causing havoc—just wants to feel accepted and learns that he has a soft-side to him after befriending a young child. While this may sound like a bad thing in that it makes Wreck-It Ralph look not-so-original, this is actually a plus in a long line of pluses that made this film totally entertaining to watch. There are lots of nice plot twists in Wreck-It Ralph...even though it's a kid's flick and not say, The Usual Suspects.
Wreck-It Ralph has a stellar cast in it—with John C. Reilly lending his voice as the title character Ralph, Sarah Silverman playing the adorable 'glitch' named Vanellope, Jack McBrayer (of NBC's 30 Rock) voicing Fix-It Felix, Jr. (who's supposed to be like Super Mario while Ralph is paying homage to Donkey Kong), Glee's Jane Lynch as the bad-ass Sergeant Calhoun, comedian Adam Carolla as Wynnchel, the always-hilarious Alan Tudyk as King Candy, The Office's Mindy Kaling as Taffyta Muttonfudge, Superbad's Joe Lo Truglio as Markowski, Modern Family's Ed O'Neill as Mr. Litwak and 24's Dennis Haysbert as General Hologram. Clearly, Disney spent lots of money to get such talented actors to lend their voices to this production.
Wreck-It Ralph has lots of familiar video game characters in it...such as Pac-Man, Bowser from Super Mario Bros., various combatants from Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Paperboy from Paperboy and even the high-tech soldiers of Xbox's ultra-popular Halo (though the title was changed to Hero's Duty...most likely due to copyright issues with Microsoft, and the fact the title is making a reference to another mega-hit video game series, Call of Duty). Wreck-It Ralph makes clever use of actual characters (I wonder how much Capcom was paid to allow Ralph to be featured in a Street Fighter II gaming scene where he gets electrocuted by Blanka?)...and found a funny way to integrate these characters into a storyline that, as mentioned in the first paragraph above, has unexpected moments in it. What kind of unexpected moments, you ask? Well— Let's just say that the main villain isn't what you'd expect him to be. There's a reason why it's a bad thing to go 'turbo' in the world of Wreck-It Ralph.
Like The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and WALL-E, I expect Wreck-It Ralph to get a Best Animated Feature Film nomination (and possibly win it) at next year's Academy Awards. I never saw Pixar's summer film Brave because it quite frankly looked unappealing...but I'll be rooting for Pixar to get some nice accolades for this latest cinematic hit. Now if you excuse me, I think I'll go play Streetfighter II on Super Nintendo. No wait— I don't have my SNES anymore. Darn it.
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