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Its exploration of the world of games through film would seem to offer an immediate audience hook, with colourful animated worlds for kids and nods to classic titles like Pac-Man and Street Fighter for adults. But like the arcade games within the film, writes Daniel Golding, Wreck-It Ralph offers more penetrating insights than are immediately apparent on screen.
It would have been easy to pitch a film like Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012). A story about classic video-game characters coming to life seems, in a way, like lowhanging fruit for an animated film. Coming from Disney and executive producer John Lasseter, the director of Toy Story (1995), it seems almost too obvious an idea - almost too easy to develop. Toy Story for the video-game generation is a pitch that writes itself: an odd-couple lead duo - one goofy and one with something to prove; a video-game world, or maybe a set of worlds, with characters travelling between different games; some nostalgic nods to the past, and maybe some cameos (if we can afford them); and a real-world video-game tie-in that the kids will love. Perfect.
Yes, this cynical, back-of-the-napkin sketch is roughly the film we get with Wreck-It Ralph. Yet there's something more going on underneath the surface - a surface that fairly quickly unravels to reveal an otherwise sticky relationship between video games and film, which Wreck-It Ralph navigates with some problems and some success.
An arcades project
'The gamers say we're retro,' Ralph declares about his game towards the end of the film, 'which I think means we're old, but cool.'
If there is one consistent thread to the cinema's use of video games, it's the desire for cool. In the most immediate sense, this has meant straightforward adaptations of video games into film: the Tomb Raiders, the Resident Evils and the Dooms that play for little more than a sense of associated cool and a pre-existing fan base. With some exceptions, these films have failed to capture anything of substance about the video games they have been based on, which has led filmmakers to look for other ways to capture the cool of gaming. One approach has been that of the blockbuster video-game documentary: stylised, funny and sometimes guileless...