Last week I was treated to a preview of Walt Disney Animation Studios “Wreck It Ralph”, a hilarious, arcade-game-hopping adventure.
When director Rich Moore joined Walt Disney Animation Studios and began developing “Wreck-It Ralph,” he had a big problem. “Arcade-game characters have no free will,” he says. “They’re programmed to do one thing day in and day out—they don’t have a choice in the matter. I thought, ‘That’s boring.’”
Or is it?
“I realized it’s actually a great conflict,” says the director. “Within this world, there are strict rules: you do one job and one job only. What if there was a character who didn’t like his job?”
At nine feet tall and 643 pounds, Ralph is certainly a force to be… well, wreck-oned with. He is a massive guy charged with wrecking the apartment building in a place called Niceland. Much to Ralph’s dismay, Fix-It Felix Jr. is called on to fix the building and save the day. With his magic hammer, Felix earns love, respect and a fancy gold medal, from the Nicelanders.
After 30 years of playing his assigned role of the “bad guy” Ralph decides to turn the tables, his plan is to win a medal and by doing so earn the kind of love and respect that Felix gets.
Ralph’s quest to win a medal will take him from his home in the game Fix-It Felix Jr. into the vast worlds the arcade has to offer. In his first adventure Ralph find himself in “Hero’s Duty”, a modern, first-person shooter game—it is brand new and the best game in the arcade. In this game, Sergeant Calhoun heads up a platoon of soldiers fighting off Cy-Bugs that are annihilating the universe. Calhoun and Ralph do not see eye to eye and her sole mission becomes getting Ralph off her turf. Ralph however will not let anything stand in the way of him getting his medal.