From Zero to Hero: Wreck-It Ralph wins friends and influences characters

Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph shows us what happens when a video game villain gets tired of playing the bad guy at every drop of a quarter. In Fix-It Felix, Jr., an old school Donkey Kong-like arcade game, Ralph (John C. Reilly) is programmed to mess things up so that perennial hero Felix  (30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer) can fix them and save the day. But being tossed from the top of the building gets old after a while, especially when the townspeople of Niceland take their day jobs home with them—making Ralph, whose actually a pretty good guy, an off-screen outcast in his own 8-bit world.

Eventually, Ralph decides to become a hero, venturing out through electrical wires to visit other game worlds and win a medal. This is where this ode to our misspent youth really gets going. We get to see the off-screen lives of simplistically rendered Pac-Man ghosts, an out-of-work Q*bert and the state-of-the-art soldiers of Hero’s Duty (led by a no-nonsense but stunningly attractive Sergeant with a heartbreaking backstory, voiced by Glee’s Jane Lynch). He ends up in a not-so-sweet avatar racing game called Sugar Rush. There he befriends an adorable troublemaking glitch named Vanellope (voiced by comedienne Sarah Silverman) and begrudgingly becomes the real hero of a little girl.

With different animation styles to reflect the evolution of games, insider (but not too insider) gaming references and characters that aren’t saccharin sweet, Wreck-It Ralph has a lot to offer kids of all ages. It certainly made us appreciate Alan Tudyk (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil), who channels Disney voice talent staple Ed Wynn (remember him as the Mad Hatter) as the manipulative King Candy. The pacing of the film is a little off and the end action isn’t quite the payoff you hope for after an amazing buildup, but it is still a pretty fantastic ride.