If you’ve never seen it, go watch "Wreck-It Ralph" before you read this review. I’ll wait. Ready? Okay, because there are spoilers ahead.
Disney Pixar gets plenty of love. The company is adored by 6 year-olds everywhere, and also pretty much everyone else. Nonetheless, even the very best can always get better, and in 2012 Disney Pixar hit a brand-new high with the release of "Wreck-It Ralph." Set within the game consoles at an arcade, the movie opens with the existential crisis of Wreck-It Ralph, a bad guy in the game “Fix-It Felix Jr.” His job is to destroy an apartment building in which the Nicelanders live, while the character Fix-It Felix fixes everything with his magic hammer. Ralph has to keep destroying the building, if he doesn’t, the game will not function properly, be marked “Out Of Order” and eventually be unplugged, leaving all its inhabitant homeless, living on the floor of the train station-style “Game Central Station,” the interior of the power strip into which all the games are plugged.
Despite their dependance on him, the Nicelanders are cruel to Ralph. The assumption is made that because he is programmed to be a “bad guy,” he really is a bad person. Excluded from parties, shunned to sleep in an actual dump, Ralph is fed up. One night, while the arcade is closed, Ralph runs away. He is determined to win a medal and prove that the “bad guy” in a video game is not always really a bad guy. After breaking into an action game called “Hero’s Duty,” Ralph accidentally lets loose a cy-bug, a sort of mutant half-bug, half-robot that infects a racing game called “Sugar Rush.” Both Ralph and the cy-bug end up trapped in "Sugar Rush." Ralph is trying to get back his medal from Hero’s Duty, which has been stolen by an outcast character in "Sugar Rush," Vanellope von Schweetz. Meanwhile, the cy-bug multiplies under the surface of the game.
"Wreck-It Ralph" is entertaining, well-written, fun and beautifully animated. The important thing, though, is that "Wreck-It Ralph" is an honest and accurate protrayal of bullying, stereotyping and peer pressure. Both Ralph and Vanellope are victims of bullying. Ralph’s bullies are the people who are prejudiced against him because of his occupation as a “bad guy.” What these Nicelanders don’t understand is that they need Ralph, and without him they’ll lose their game. Even so, the Nicelanders exclude and disrespect Ralph. Their game must be threatened by him leaving for them to realize how important he is to them. Vanellope von Schweetz’s bullies are primarily the other racers in "Sugar Rush," but the real culprit is King Candy, who has altered the code to make Vanellope glitchy and then convinced the rest of the game’s characters that Vanellope is a glitchy pariah who is unsuited to race. She is pushed down in mud, her homemade go-cart is torn to pieces and yet she is still able to giggle. She still believes in herself and fights hard to get into a race.
And that mentality is what makes "Wreck-It Ralph" so special, it does not matter what everyone else thinks. You can do whatever you put your mind to, bullies be damned.
