is only one of many game environments created in the film, which cleverly toggles between its own rather conventionally bigheaded, smooth-featured character design and the variously crude, fanciful and realistic styles that the players would see. Every time a quarter drops into the slot, he smashes up an apartment building until it is repaired and he is routed by Felix, a twerpy goody two-shoes voiced by Jack McBrayer.įix-it Felix Jr. Reilly, has toiled for 30 years as the “bad guy” in a game called Fix-it Felix Jr. Ralph, a lumbering giant with huge hands, an appetite for destruction and the voice of John C. They may command our sometimes compulsive attention, but can we ever really love them? In some ways this represents an easier cognitive leap, since those characters already possess rudimentary personalities along with the ability to move and make sounds.īut video game characters are also the coldblooded (or maybe code-blooded) inhabitants of rigidly deterministic worlds. “Wreck-It Ralph” attempts a similar feat with the pixilated avatars that shoot, scamper and zoom across our various interactive screens. The “Toy Story” movies have taught us to empathize with inanimate, mass-produced playthings, to imagine them with inner lives in some ways richer than our own. The merchandising potential is limitless! In either case, the movie invites a measure of cynicism - which it proceeds to obliterate with a 93-minute blast of color, noise, ingenuity and fun. Scholars of corporate pop-culture synergy, on the other hand, will wonder what took so long, since between them the kiddie-cartoon and joystick rackets account for untold billions of dollars in revenue.

This will strike many parents as a consummation devoutly to be dreaded, akin to a sentence of consecutive birthday parties at Chuck E. “Wreck-It Ralph,” a brand-new Walt Disney feature, unites child-friendly 3-D animation with video games.

Wreck it ralph