I love the idea of Disney’s upcoming Wreck-It Ralph. A video game villain, voiced by John C. Reilly, decides he no longer wants to be a video game villain. When Ralph – a sort of human version of Donkey Kong in a support group of video game villains which include Bowser, M. Bison, and a Pac-Man ghost, mind you – says, “It sure must be nice being the good guy,” Zangief of Street Fighter fame consoles him by saying in his heavy accent Russian ancient, “Ralph, you are bad guy… but this does not mean you are bad guy.” Soon, he decides to leave his game after thirty years in a quest to become a video game hero.
While the trailer plays the nostalgia card pretty heavy and is looking for a double dip of audiences that will include not only children but adults who grew up playing old-school games, there very well could be a movie there behind all the Sonic and Q*bert cameos. The trailer did was Disney aimed to do. It has me intrigued. I won’t be looking for a Pixar quality animated movie and I expect most adults who go won’t. Instead, I’ll be looking for some amusing references and a trip down memory lane – and all we can hope is we get a pretty good movie to entertain us along the way.
Other voice-actors for Wreck-It Ralph include star Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch, Jack McBrayer, Adam Carolla, Mindy Kaling, Ed O’Neill, and Alan Tudyk.
Old-school gamers, check it out. Does the trailer do anything for you or do you think the concept will lose its charm before the credits roll?
It doesn’t matter much to me, but Pixar putting established video game characters (Bowser, Sonic, ect) in their movie should help argue for video games as art.
I think my parents and a lot of older people still view video games as juvenile wastes of time. Pixar’s good name associated with video games I think helps video games perception with certain audiences.
Video games and the public consciousness reminds me of how comics were viewed in the 40s and 50s.
I’m actually in agreement with though, although I should probably clear up that while this is Disney, it’s not actually Pixar. So, it’s more like Tangled than Toy Story.
But still, good points.
My mistake. I saw Disney and CGI and assumed it was Pixar. I forgot about regular Disney CGI movies.
On the bright side, it’s directed by Rich Moore who has extensive experience directing Futurama, The Simpsons, and The Critic and John Lasseter, Pixar’s daddy and the director of Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug’s Life, Cars, and Cars 2, is still running the show behind the scenes of this as executive producer. So it’s as close to a Pixar film as one can get without being a Pixar film.
Oh and sort of off-topic, but interesting, according to IGN, there will be 188 actually character models used of actual video game characters (http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/06/wreck-it-ralph-creators-on-using-actual-video-game-characters). And, unfortunately, they tried to get Mario and Luigi, but Nintendo wanted to high of a payment for them.