Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Side note: The animated short Paper Man was very good. The animation was a unique blend of CGI but made to look like hand drawn animation. The only slight issue I had with it is that the short got crazy at the end and became unbelievable. Still cute.

Being a gamer, I decided to go to this movie. I knew the movie was going to be good, but I didn't expect it to be really good. The action, humor, voice-acting, plot, and animation are all great. Since this movie is aimed towards gamers, I feel like a lot of the cameos and jokes are going to fly over most people's heads, such as "All your base are belong to us" written on a subway wall or "Leroy Jenkins was here". Thankfully, the movie doesn't rely on cameos to be successful.

The animation in Wreck-It Ralph is very beautiful, and is great at expressing the video game world. I did not see it in 3D, but just from watching it in 2D I can tell that this movie would look amazing in 3D. The animators did really good in this movie because each video game world looks vastly different from another. Each world feels like an actual video game that I've played. If there is one problem that I can pick out in this movie (and many others have noted this as well) is that the plot focuses on the Sugar Rush world a bit too much. Most of the other worlds are revealed at the beginning mainly for the sake of reference, with only a few actually being important.

The humor in Wreck-It Ralph is good because it hits a very large audience. A lot of the cameos and jokes are related to video games but there are also a lot of movie references as well, puns, slapstick jokes, and some crude humor. Some people complained at the crude humor but honestly it didn't bother me because it was coming from a character who looks like she is five, so it actually made sense.

The interesting thing about Wreck-It Ralph's plot is that it has very little to do with an external conflict, but more with an internal one (which is a pun in itself because they are inside of video games). There is a main bad guy, and a huge disaster, and all of these other conflicts but these elements are back seat to the character development. I thought it was neat since most animated movies do the opposite. The voices for all of the characters were really well done. There weren't any annoying characters which adds to the movie. Another nice thing about the plot is that main bad guy is not revealed until the very end of the movie which focuses the plot on the characters, not the action or the villain.

Overall a really great movie. Spectacular animation, great voice work, emotional and even touching at times, and overall humorous. While the Sugar Rush world might get slightly stale after awhile, it is still excellent movie. Gamers, this goes to you, WATCH THIS MOVIE!