Over the past years, Disney has struggled to produce animated films with the box office success of their subsidiary – Pixar. Disney have also been putting a bigger effort into drawing in male audiences which is most evident when they acquired Marvel not too long ago and Lucas Arts more recently.
Wreck-it Ralph is Disney’s latest attempt to gain a larger male following and that doesn’t mean the animation excludes their female audience. The animated film follows a video game ‘bad guy’ named Ralph who sets on an adventure to become the hero despite his destructive nature.
The introduction was great in contextualising audiences not familiar to the whole video games thing and gives Ralph a bit more depth by presenting a toy story like scenario. The characters of the video games are played by children who visit the arcade and come to life in their closing hours. You get to see the video game hub, where all the characters congregate and is rife with cameos and references to the video game genre. Disney really did their research considering it would probably take several viewings to capture all the references and I credit them for keeping them mostly obscure. I won’t mention any specifics so you can discover them yourselves and wet your pants.
Though I have to say, those references weren’t the reason why Wreck-it Ralph was such a great film. I wasn’t sure if it was because I haven’t seen any animations in quite a while or the level of quality Disney instilled in this piece but honestly the worlds were beautiful especially the candy world which were a feast for my eyes. Some characters were even jittery in movements like how they are meant to be in the games. Vanellope was a really adorable little girl although I found Sarah Silverman’s voice irritating at times. There were some great emotional moments between Ralph and Vanellope, one in particular which was really shocking and seemed a bit too dark for an animation. This applies to the ‘end boss’ who was also quite scary for a kid’s film. Nonetheless I applaud Disney for their inclusion.
Disney did an amazing job at creating an incredibly fun animation that was adorable and was amazing to stare at. It was comical, it was serious, it had its emotions. It was a movie about video games for crying out loud!
loopy 