Originally posted at the DL November 2015
*squeeee* omygodohmygod PIXAR IS DOING SOMETHING THAT FEELS LIKE PIXAR AND NOT LOW RENT DISNEY
So let's itemize the obvious strong points of the film based on this then talk about specific victories and flaws.
- Fucking gorgeous. Not just well animated, but the designs on the characters and small details therein are great stuff. The Nicelanders are animated in 8-bit!
- Excellent marriage of fantastic concepts with grounded, personal storytelling
- Excellent use of celebrity voices. Sarah Silverman as the ultimate brat man.
- Uplifting humanist messaging without talking down to the audience.
*wawawa* Huh? This isn't Pixar? Are you sure? It was out around the same time as that Princess movie from Disney. *wawa* Brave was Pixar? Really? Man, 2012 was a fucked up year.
Okay, so non-musical Disney! And jokes aside, while certain elements are closer to the Disney side, the single best part of this movie is really just how... real the game worlds are, and taking new sorts of settings and making them alive is just sort of the Pixar bread and butter. And I'm not gonna lie, when I wrote that for Inside Out I was planning to reuse it for Wreck-It Ralph the whole time. Can't let a set-up like that go to waste.
Anyway, so I'm torn between just goddamned gushing about the three component games and doing a "of course it's awesome let's move on". It's a brilliant setup even setting aside their visual design, they feel like real games that would have existed in their respective eras, and is a great mix of genres, styles, and so forth. The arcade conceit is sometimes a smidge distracting because quite a lot of the references and so forth are decidedly non-arcade games but eh, minor. Then again at the visual level a lot of the point of the movie is as a celebration of the history and breadth of game design, so not including them would be far more distracting.
Actually though on this viewing I found myself really noticing the designs of the characters a bit more. They are equally fantastic. Calhoun in particular is just kinda amazing. But that makes sense since in large part this is just these doofuses trying to make their way through a situation none of them were programmed to handle.
Tangent: "She was programmed with the most tragic backstory ever" is among the best bits of dialog ever spoken and I won't hear otherwise. That they even PAY IT OFF later with the laser sight gag in the ending is double bonus of course. Actually, most of what Calhoun does is pretty funny, which is kinda great; the tragic character from the terrifying hellscape lightgun game is the comic relief.
Anyways the movie ends up playing with a contrast between who the characters are as programs and who they are as people, which is interesting because unlike, say, Tiny Toons, you get the sense that it's less that they're actors playing a role in the game so much as they somehow sorta take the character they were programmed as and become more people as their lives go on. I almost want to go back through it looking for those bits to see if I find more, but nah, this is about the third time I've tried to watch this for write-up so let's get stuff done.
The hardcore emotional notes are just... daaaaammn, y'know? I mean as much of a betrayal as it is for Ralph to wreck the kart, you can see it, in that moment. We just had to watch Vanellope die! Really nastily, begging for help and everything. And really the rest of the movie would have to fuck up pretty bad everywhere else to drag that sort of thing down.
Instead it has a rather well handled twist with the villain. So yeah, y'all know what I'm going to say here.
Rating- 9/10
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