Not exactly a must-see, but the best thing to see with the little ones

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2013)

Much has been said of the way that Disney's latest and of this decade greatest animated release portrays the inside world of video games as inventively as Pixar first caught our attention by opening up the world of toys. Indeed, the familiar and invented video game characters featured in Wreck it Ralph move and talk in their off-duty periods just as you would imagine, being sure to please avid gamers just as much as Pixar's first feature delight toy-lovers. The joys of being an arcade favourite are highly prized and quite viciously fought over between games, just like the need to be played with in the toy world. Even more so, the threat of suddenly being deemed defective or dull, and consequently "unplugged", hangs ominously over the proceedings. The children in Toy Story were always prone to having fads, novelties, and maturing interests draw them away from formerly beloved toys, but it would still take them a long time to finitely abandon their physically present plastic companions. In the gaming world, it can happen in an instant to any game it seems, apart from classics like Pac-Man.
Both films also have, as a narrative starting point for the main adventures, the visible jealous frustrations of a protagonist who feels unjustly treated. However, while Woody's bitter envy of the effortlessly popular Buzz Lightyear was graspable, but not terribly sympathetic, the plight of the title character of Disney's picture rings immediately with undeniable unfairness and endears us completely to the poor man. Ralph (appropriately voiced by the always endearing John C. Reilly) is the burly villain of the fictional game Fix-It Felix Jr., all day performing the thankless task of smashing a perfectly constructed red brick house floor by floor, so that Felix, the lovable hero, can repair the damage and receive a medal from the ever-so-friendly residents, who then toss poor Ralph off the top floor and into the mud.
In the opening expositional scenes of the film, he shares his misery with his fellow villains at a meeting of Bad Guys Anonymous, and to the audience. He desperately wants the respect and love that the heroes are laden with each day, and becomes convinced that to somehow procure a medal like the ones Felix is always get will see him enjoy these privileges.
To any frequenter of animated children's film the plot point of this superficial quest seems bound for one resolution only: a session of sentimental moralising where Ralph realises that the medal doesn't matter, that it can't buy him friendship that he shouldn't seek to be anything other than what he is. Woody's story went down a similar path, but unlike Woody, Ralph eventually meets an unlikely kindred spirit in his loneliness and torment. Vanellope, a little girl car racer from the aptly named Sugar Rush game, threatens at first to be the writers' self- confessed highly annoying comic sidekick, but is soon shown to be just as much of a sympathetic outcast as Ralph. King Candy, the erratic, word-playing sovereign of this Willy-Wonk-like land of creative confectionery constructions and pricelessly sweet puns has marginalised her as a poisonous glitch in the game, preventing her from racing. A stickler for game conventionalism, he quickly becomes the adversary of the odd couple of heroes, who are also being chased by the stout Felix as well as Calhoun, the fearless, no-nonsense army commander of Hero's Duty.
As lovely as the friendship between the tiny girl and giant man may be, not quite enough time is spent on the entertaining banter and remittent co-operation between the prickly indomitable woman and the smaller, sweeter man at her side. That said, we certainly get a satisfying amount of the wacky King that seems a deviously eccentric cross between Uther Pendragon from the new TV series Merlin and, more obviously the Mad Hatter from Disney's cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland (1951), with the look and voice of that character clearly being an inspiration. Alan Tudyk, who's perhaps best known for playing the naked drugged-up fiancée in Death at a Funeral (2007), in many ways emulates Ed Wynn's zany sing- song tones, exaggerating even more the hilarious lisp. He and Sarah Silverman, who, at 42, miraculously reaches the giddy heights of an 8- year-old's voice as Vanellope, were the two unexpected pieces of perfect casting. As expected, John C. Reilly as the gentle Ralph and Jane Lynch, who plays Sue Sylvester in Glee, as the fierce Calhoun are effortlessly brilliant, and it's also a nice surprise to hear the voice of Ed O'Neil as the owner of the arcade.
On top of the humour, the pathos, the quality animation, the action and the clever characterisations, which you'd expect from a director – Rich Moore – who's worked quite extensively on The Simpsons and Futurama, the visual design of literally several whole universes inside the games world is quite stunning, especially the joyously colourful land of Sugar Rush, but it's really the excitement of the story that makes the biggest impact. It would appear that executive producer John Lasseter has enforced the old Pixar maxim "The story is king!" as the graphics, as impressive as they are, are never expected to carry or even save the movie, that job has rightly been given to the narrative. Now that the new digital Disney studio is finally starting to learn a thing or two from the medium's greatest pioneer, let's hope the pupil hasn't outshone the master after the release of Monsters' University, the third consecutive sequel that Pixar has produced this decade.