To Create, You Must First Wreck

Don't underestimate your eight bit villains. 2012's Wreck-It Ralph represents the beginning of drastic change at Walt Disney Animation Studios in terms of creative vision, most obviously because it was co-written by Jennifer Lee. The woman who would go on to write and direct Frozen, she seems to have brought the first truly vibrant creative voice to the studio since the '90s. Here's an artist with thematic preoccupations, or so one might assume when comparing Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen--both movies are about characters originally designed to be villains who become heroes. But that's not what Wreck-It Ralph's really about and it's not where its greatest strength lies. Wreck-It Ralph works like clock, or even a video game, if you will--it's tightly constructed; story elements are set up subtly but memorably enough before they pay off later in the film. It leads to the single most effective scene in a Disney animated film since Pocahontas.

After Ralph (John C. Reilly) helps Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) learn how to drive her new race car, and thus participate in the race that forms the centrepiece of her game world, he runs into another of the game's characters, King Candy (Alan Tudyk), who very convincingly gives Ralph reasons why he shouldn't help Vanellope. The plausibility of what the King says is so clearly apparent that the following scene, when Ralph has to be cruel to Vanellope, works vastly better than such scenes usually do.

The film is obviously very postmodern, very meta, but it establishes very solid rules for its reality, a shared world of arcade games, and uses those solidly established rules to generate tension as well as heroic pay-offs. We know the hero of Ralph's game, Felix (Jack McBrayer), has a magic hammer that can fix anything, yet it's still surprising and rewarding when he can fix certain things that seem impossibly damaged. But what about this story of a villain leaving his assigned role to become a hero? Is Ralph a Satanic Hero like Elsa? Not really.

Early on, we see Ralph visiting a support group for video game villains. Their mantra is, "Just because I'm the Bad Guy, doesn't mean I'm a bad guy." And indeed, no-one is permanently killed in Ralph's game and even the property he wrecks is always completely fixed. One might wonder if the characters feel the pain of their struggles, like the angels in Paradise Lost who can triumph over each other in battle despite both sides being indestructible. If that's so, then it's Ralph, who's routinely thrown off the top of the building, who gets the worst of it.

He's not really any kind of villain--it's a pantomime and everyone sees it as such.

His game, Fix-It Felix, Jr., looks like a combination of Rampage and Donkey Kong. Rampage truly reorients the villain to the hero position--it features "anti-heroes" by the true definition of the word--the player controls giant monsters who not only destroy buildings but eat people. Donkey Kong features a giant ape who apparently seeks to sexually assault Pauline. Both games would have led to more genuinely sinister characters than what we get in Wreck-It Ralph so we can assume Ralph, as a "villain", was quite deliberately softened, for one reason or another.

Wreck-It Ralph, like Tangled, ultimately endorses conformity, despite superficially being about people who would stray outside their designated places in society. Everyone goes back to their respective games in the end in order to keep the same narratives going for the players (even though characters from two different games marry). Vanellope, at first introduced as a "glitch", a possibly unfinished character whose assets remained in the programme upon release, is ultimately revealed to have a more legitimate right to being in the game than her detractors. The point becomes not, "celebrate the aberrations" but "some apparent aberrations aren't aberrations at all so therefore they're okay". To hammer the point home, the final villain of the story is someone who has succeeded in leaving one game to become a permanent part of another.

But this is still a more solidly written film than Tangled and its characters, particularly Ralph and Vanellope, have a more satisfying and captivating relationship. Felix and a character voiced by Jane Lynch have a romantic subplot that's pretty effective, too.

A student at the junior high school where I work here in Japan told me the movie's Japanese title is Sugar Rush, this being the name of Vanellope's game. It's interesting to think about how a little difference of title completely reframes the story. The film also features a song called "Sugar Rush" by Japanese pop group AKB48:

I'm not an AKB48 fan but I'd say they were certainly the right fit for the material.

Wreck-It Ralph is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh