A Complete Analysis of Wreck-It Ralph Part 2: World Building, Level Design, and Strange Thematic Shifts (Film Analysis)

LINK TO PART 1:

Wreck-It Ralph takes place primarily inside arcade games inside a place called Litwak’s Arcade.  There, the arcade games’s characters are sentient beings who act similarly to the Toy Story toys—playing their designated in-game roles during the day and acting themselves once the humans have all gone home (it’s fortunate Litwak has no security guard).  One of the oldest arcade games there is Fix-It Felix, Jr.—home to the film’s title character Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly).  In-game, Ralph plays the role of bad guy—wrecking up an apartment building that houses NPCs called Nicelanders (Fix-It Felix, Jr.’s universe being called Niceland) while the player-controlled hero Fix-It Felix (Jack McBrayer) is tasked with repairing Ralph’s mess.  In reality, however, Ralph is a genuinely nice guy—merely playing his designated game role.  Nonetheless, the Nicelanders fear Ralph and treat him with disdain while showering Felix with admiration and praise—throwing their hero parties and giving him medals while leaving Ralph outside in the game’s dump.  After thirty years, Ralph is fed up with such treatment and leaves Fix-It Felix Jr. to win a hero’s medal and gain the Nicelanders’s esteem.

Ralph travels to the Arcade’s recently plugged-in first-person shooter Hero’s Duty and is immediately overwhelmed by the modern game’s graphic violence and harsh setting.  Through cheating, Ralph obtains the game’s medal but is uncontrollably blasted out of the game and into a racer called Sugar Rush.  There, Ralph’s medal is stolen and lost by a young girl named Vanellope (Sarah Silverman).  Vanellope is a glitchy racer who has been banned from racing by orders of Sugar Rush’s ruler King Candy (Alan Tudyk).  Vanellope strikes a deal with Ralph that if he can help her get into and win a race, she’ll get back his medal.  Meanwhile, Ralph is pursued by Felix and Hero’s Duty’s Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch)—the former trying to get Ralph back before their game is permanently shut down, and the latter due to Ralph having unintentionally taken a deadly virus from Hero’s Duty into Super Rush.

The premise of Ralph’s predicament sounds true to Disney’s standard animated protagonist’s character arc, with the villain-protagonist twist looking notably similar to previous animated films of the decade like Despicable Me and Megamind.  Yet where Wreck-It Ralph distinguishes itself from the aforementioned material is in the unique manner it utilizes said storytelling.  Unlike Despicable Me and Megamind, Ralph is not a traditional bad guy, merely playing his game’s role.  Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto once stated how he viewed the Mario characters as “a troupe of actors” that simply play the role designated for each story/game being played.  Wreck-It Ralph treats its characters similarly (additionally making Bowser’s appearance in the film a subtle case of fridge brilliance).  The game characters spend their days fighting or racing one another before heading out to Tappers as friends during “closing time”.

Yet fiction and reality can get blurry if one plays the part well enough, which is exactly what occurs between Ralph and the Nicelanders.  The Nicelanders fear and dislike Ralph’s destructive, temperamental persona so much that it blinds them from his true self.  Their feelings are understandable, after all, who wouldn’t form a grudge against someone who destroyed and terrorized your home on a daily basis, even if it was just an act.  Ralph isn’t the only “villain” to go through such experience, with the BAD-ANON support group being created to help bad guys cope with their situation.  While meant as a humorous parallel to real-life support groups, BAD-ANON also serves as a great bit of world-building for Wreck-It Ralph’s fictional universe right from the get-go.

From a licensing/permission standpoint, the universe inside Litwak’s Arcade is thoughtfully established to be small and contained.  All the arcade games are connected to one another through a power strip called game central station.  There, all the arcade games’s characters can interact and visit one another’s games, with characters that no longer have games due to being unplugged living there as homeless residents.  Such establishment makes it clear this isn’t a universe with every video game ever--only the one’s located within Litwak’s Arcade.  This gives Wreck-It Ralph an explainable in-film reason—to an extent—as to why the licensed video game cameos feel so limited.

The arcade game characters must be careful when jumping games, however, as while they have unlimited lives in their own game, if they die in another game they die for real.  It’s a clever way to establish how these characters can survive so many fatal game overs, throw in some funny gags like Ralph accidentally killing Felix at a party, and still have tense situations when characters are in foreign games…that is until the film completely contradicts its own established rules. Minor Spoilers Begin: Yeah, Wreck-It Ralph goes back on its own lore during the epilogue when Ralph gets some of the homeless game characters jobs in Fix-It Felix Jr.  This alone sounds wildly dangerous for the alien characters who only have one life there, but it gets even worse when a dynamite-type minion is seen blowing himself up.  I repeat, a character from another game blows himself up.  By all established rules, the dynamite character should be permanently dead.  I guess a counter-argument can be made that Ralph and co. recoded the game’s data so the homeless characters were considered part of Fix-It Felix Jr.—an earlier scene shows a character doing something similar, signifying it may be possible—yet this is mere speculation with the film never stating such to be true or possible. Minor Spoilers End

For a film designed around a connected arcade game universe, the number of visited game worlds is rather skimpy—with only two real game worlds (Pac-Man and Tapper) and three fictional ones focused on.  The three fictional games Fix-It Felix Jr., Hero’s Duty, and Sugar Rush each heavily reference real games.  Fix-It Felix Jr. is a clear-cut tribute to the 1980s Donkey Kong arcade games (similarities including Felix being a blue-collar worker who jumps and uses a hammer, Ralph standing at some structure’s top using falling objects to try and hurt Felix, etc.) with some nods to Crazy Climber and Rampage (though in a reverse manner for the latter).  Fix-It Felix Jr.’s world has a relevant feel to its in-film era of creation in 1982.  The game’s world is small and compact, everything from the scenery to the characters are blocky, and everything has a phosphorescence glow.  When the character use actions from Fix-It Felix Jr. such as jumping and wrecking, they move using stiff, limited frames fitting of their game.  An unnecessary extra touch I love is how the artwork on Fix-It Felix Jr.’s machine has Felix’s shirt the wrong color—a subtle nod to how older games often featured misrepresenting artwork.

By contrast, the modern-day Hero’s Duty and Sugar Rush (the latter having only been plugged in for a week) are far more massive, smoother, and graphically enhanced.  The film throws in a witty mention of the latter when an enamored Felix flirtatiously notes Sergeant Calhoun’s “high-definition” face.  Hero’s Duty is a hybrid between the Metroid, Halo, and Call of Duty series turned into an arcade first-person shooter.  The in-game’s actual first-person shooter is a robot with a visual computer screen for its controller to see their world.  Ralph’s brash intrusion into the game makes for some light comedic commentary on the evolution of video games and their violence—including Ralph originally having expected the game to be like Centipede and a hilarious deadpan expression from the player staring at NPC Ralph freaking out.  

Sugar Rush is a mix between Candy Land, the Mario Kart series and the standard variety of arcade racers.  The world contains a variety of dessert-related racing areas such as a gumdrop valley, cake mountain, ice cream winter wonderland, and even a railless rainbow road (the latter presumably made out of some kind of sweet).  The world is sprinkled with racing game nods like secret pathways and powerup blocks—yet Sugar Rush is also where the whole video game motif gets weird.  While Sugar Rush is an arcade racer, it’s far more of a tribute to Candy Land and…cinema oddly enough.  In fact, it’s when Ralph enters Sugar Rush that the film almost entirely drops making video games references and begins making candy-related puns and jokes instead.  The Candy King’s guards are Oreos that chant “Or-e-O” in a manner referring The Wizard of Oz, tracking “Devil Dogs” are sent out to find Ralph, Ralph refers to the kid racers as “Children of the Candy Corn”, etc.  Don’t get me wrong, these jokes can and are funny, yet are a complete shift from the film’s video game themeing—feeling out of place and off-topic (also how does Ralph know about Children of the Corn?).

LINK TO PART 3: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Super Smash Bros, and Licensed Cameos