Wreck-It Ralph (formerly Reboot Ralph)

[disneyboy20022]

@PatrickvD: Haha, yeah, I know. I meant this weekend. I'm trying to see WIR ASAP.

Yup, but don't risk your life though

How crazy that is actually meant in all seriousness. I hope all UD'ers are safe over there!

Yep, I Agree. Not to get off topic, but the Disney Fantasy Cruise Ship was caught in Hurricane Sandy.

[NeverLand]

The Soundtrack is out Now on iTunes.



The soundtrack is just amazing!

[partofdisneyworld]

The merchandising from the film is now available in stores, here you have some photos:

http://parksandresorts.wdpromedia.com/m ... 4SMALL.jpg

http://parksandresorts.wdpromedia.com/m ... 4SMALL.jpg

http://parksandresorts.wdpromedia.com/m ... 5SMALL.jpg

[DisneyEra]

The Soundtrack is out Now on iTunes.



The soundtrack is just amazing!

It sure is! Yesterday someone on Tumblr posted a link to download the entire Wreck-it Ralph soundtrack! 162mbs.

[Polizzi]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph/

As of right now on Rotten Tomatoes...
All Critics: 78%
Top Critics: TBA

[DisneyJedi]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph/

As of right now on Rotten Tomatoes...
All Critics: 78%
Top Critics: TBA

Not to be all doom and gloom, but I don't know if I like the sound of that...

[jazzflower92]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph/

As of right now on Rotten Tomatoes...
All Critics: 78%
Top Critics: TBA

Not to be all doom and gloom, but I don't know if I like the sound of that...

I saw two of those reviews and they seem to be really from my opinion really terrible ones.Actually one of them was from Slate which is known for giving bad reviews for a lot of good movies.

[ajmrowland]

78% is actually a good score and it's all opinions anyway. Cloud Atlas got a 71% and I'm okay with it but I wasnt expecting that movie to have critics falling over.

[Kyle]

With only 9 reviews counted Im surprised they have enough to put up a percentage. I wouldn't put anything into that just yet. Its only 2 rotten, that's nothing at this point.

That said I wouldnt be too surprised if a lot of critics rail on very concept itself, they might see it as too much of a gimmick putting all these references in there to appeal to a lesser art form according to people like Roger Ebert. This is definitely one of those movies where I'd put more stock in the public opinion over the critics. But hopefully it stays fresh for both.

Before someone chimes in with a "why are you letting others form your opinion for you?" Im not, I'll see it regardless and make up my own mind. But I still like to to follow general consensus and have used it some times to help decide if a movie is worth checking out, as I tend to agree with one of them anyway. Some movies like this are no brainers, but some could go either way. Usually if there's a common complaint, there's a good reason for it and your likely to feel the same way. At least I do. Same goes for praise.

[ajmrowland]

^Ebert said that. Ebert just lost points from me.

[PatrickvD]

^Ebert said that. Ebert just lost points from me.

Ebert has no taste in film whatsoever. He never had any points as far as I'm concerned.

[Disney's Divinity]

Well, the game concept is a gimmick. It remains to be seen if it has anything good beyond the gimmick, like Toy Story.

[estefan]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph/

As of right now on Rotten Tomatoes...
All Critics: 78%
Top Critics: TBA

Not to be all doom and gloom, but I don't know if I like the sound of that...

Yeah, it's way too early. The number could easily could up in the next couple of days when more reviews start being added.

Also (even though it will never happen), Rotten Tomatoes should take the percentage off the top of the page. People just seem to lazily look at it and not scroll down to read the reviews, which gives a much better idea of the overall consensus than some number does.

[Kyle]

^Ebert said that. Ebert just lost points from me.

Ebert has no taste in film whatsoever. He never had any points as far as I'm concerned.

He's made plenty of valid points and good taste generally. Even when I disagree with him completely he still manages to get my respect in the end most of the time. With the exception of things like his feeling on videogames as an art form, or 3D in movies. In these ways he has this old man mentality that is biased against anything new or different.

The thing is, Ebert isn't alone on those either. A lot of critics share those thoughts.

[qindarka]

Reviews are picking up, which I'm glad to see. Expect it to rise further in the next week.

Really hope Ebert gives it a positive review, though I fear his distaste of video games may sway him. OF course, he may nit even watch it as was the case with Bolt and Tangled.

[estefan]

Well, he is a huge fan of Tron and gave Tron: Legacy and The King of Kong positive reviews. So, it wouldn't too out-of-the-question. So maybe he won't let his disinterest in video games affect his overall opinion on Wreck-It Ralph.

[Polizzi]

'Wreck-It Ralph' is a Disney animation game-changer
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movi ... n/1667373/

'Wreck-It Ralph' might be the right prince to reawaken Disney as an animated-feature studio to reckon with.

Walt Disney must be grinning in his grave.

His namesake animation studio — where fairy tales have always come true, at least in cartoon form — is on the verge of a creative reawakening with Friday's arrival of Wreck-It Ralph.

It's a fast-paced comedy designed to appeal to both joystick jockeys of yore and the remote-waving Wii generation. And it does for a gaming arcade what 1995's Toy Story, the first-ever digital-animated feature, did for a kid's bedroom: expose a secret world populated with fully realized characters and filled with humor, heart and a flashy arsenal of cutting-edge visuals.

Except that Wreck-It Ralph power-ups that premise by taking place in four distinctive worlds, three of which are based on different game styles:

- Fix-It Felix is a primitive 8-bit game, much like Donkey Kong, where Ralph does his wrecking.

- The more sophisticated Sugar Rush is a racing competition similar to Mario Kart with an anime-influenced confectionary theme (including such hazards as Nesquik sand and eruptions caused by Mentos dropped in cola) and a brash imp named Vanellope von Schweetz (voiced by sassy comic Sarah Silverman).

- Hero's Duty is a high-def first-person-shooter adventure starring the statuesque Marine Sgt. Calhoun (a take-no-prisoners Jane Lynch of Glee) with a Cy-Bug egg hatchery that is the eye-dazzling equal of any alien effect in Prometheus.

- Game Central Station is a neutral zone, where the characters interact and travel via power cords.

Basically, it's Disney on entertainment-enhancing steroids.

As a result, a decade-plus dry spell that has bedeviled Disney, a pioneer in the art of feature-length animation with 1937'sSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is poised to be broken by a different kind of prince. One who happens to be a 9-foot-tall, 643-pound ham-fisted galoot of a villain who breaks the rules and game-hops to prove he's a hero, too.

Early reactions suggest that mountainous Ralph, who blusters with amusing blue-collar burliness thanks John C. Reilly of Step Brothers fame, just might save the day in more ways than one.

"Disney is reinvigorating its brand and has created perhaps its very own answer to Pixar with one of the best animated films of the year," says Paul Dergarabedian, box-office tracker for Hollywood.com. "Every parent I know says their kids cannot wait to see Wreck-It Ralph, and I think the box-office results will be huge."

And after days of cabin fever brought on by Hurricane Sandy, families who can get out of the house might be ready to storm the movie theaters this weekend.


Even Baby Boomers who were enchanted by 1959'sSleeping Beauty as tots and took their children to 1992's Aladdin might have noticed that, until recently, the Magic Kingdom has been an underdog in an increasingly competitive marketplace, which has seen the other five major Hollywood studios score hits in the animation arena.

The reason for the slump? After an animated revival in 1989 with the bubbly The Little Mermaid, Disney clung to its tradition of 2-D hand-drawn cartoons a little too long. As a result, the company lagged in converting from pencils to pixels, releasing such relics as 2003'sBrother Bear long after in-house rival Pixar and DreamWorks (led by ex-Disney honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg) claimed computers as their preferred tool for making animated films.

"They were in the wilderness for a while," says Immersed in Movies blogger Bill Desowitz about Disney's downgraded status after ruling the genre with 1991'sBeauty and the Beast (the first animated film to be a best-picture Oscar nominee) and 1994'sThe Lion King (still the second-highest-grossing animated film worldwide after 2010's Toy Story 3). "They became the whipping boy with their first several computer-animated movies," such as the best-forgotten Chicken Little from 2005.

But in 2006, when Disney bought Pixar and placed the company's co-chiefs, Toy Story director John Lasseter and high-tech whiz Ed Catmull, in charge of both divisions, there was a renewed commitment to rebuilding the reputation of the House of Mouse.

The change in leadership might have come just in the nick of time, according to Lasseter, who has been an executive producer on nearly all of the studio's animated releases in the past six years, including Wreck-It Ralph.

Asked if there was any talk of simply pulling the plug on Disney animation, especially considering Pixar's stellar string of No. 1 box-office hits (13 for 13 so far), he concedes, "There was some discussion."

However, as a life-long Disneyphile himself, Lasseter says, "we weren't going to let that happen on our watch. We were determined to save the legacy of Walt Disney's amazing studio and bring it back up to the creative level it had to be. Saving this heritage was squarely on our shoulders."

The first stirrings of a rebound arrived with 2010's Tangled, a snappy reworking of fairy-tale classic Rapunzel that managed to infuse the warm fluidity of hand-drawn animation on top of the cool glossiness of computer-generated images. Box office far exceeded expectations: nearly $600 million worldwide, the second-highest Disney grosser after The Lion King.

Don Hahn was there for the first revival as the producer of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, as well as for the decline (his little-seen Atlantis: The Lost Empire had the misfortune to open in the summer of 2001, right after DreamWorks' computer-animated smash Shrek).

Hahn is no longer on the front lines of the 'toon wars. But while working on nature documentaries on the studio's Burbank, Calif., lot, he has witnessed a shift at his old digs across the way — the animation building that features the hat from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. "There is definitely hallway buzz, a sense of internal pride. You can feel it. There is an esprit de corps."

Having gone through a similar renaissance, Hahn knows the signs of a comeback in the making. "There is a new generation of artists coming of age now who are very hungry and talented, and Disney now has something to offer them."

Wreck-It Ralph has been the beneficiary of all that positive energy and then some. How the turnaround happened:

- A new 'tude. Disney has always been an executive-led studio, Lasseter says, with layers of bosses deciding what the talent that actually makes the movies should do, including mandatory notes on changes. "That's the way most animation studios are set up," he says.

But not Pixar. And now, not Disney, either. Instead, a so-called creative brain trust made up filmmakers is responsible for generating ideas that can be turned into scripts. They then pitch the best ones at a meeting, and directors are assigned to the ones that have the most potential.

That way, says Lasseter, there is a personal investment that everyone shares. "We want to empower creative people," he says. "When they feel it's their child, they bend over backwards to raise it properly." As a result, "You are what you direct. You see bits and pieces of all of us in our work."

- New talent. There is more than a little of Rich Moore in Wreck-It Ralph, as the veteran of TV's The Simpsonsand Futurama makes his feature-film directing debut. Just as Ralph rebels against being programmed as a bad guy for 30 years, Moore did not want to be known as only a TV animation guy, either.

While the idea for a video-game movie had been lingering at Disney for a while, it was Moore's introduction of Ralph's identity crisis that made it workable. Or, as Lasseter says, "it made the story relatable to more than just people who love video games."

"When I came to the studio in 2008," Moore says, "John said, 'Don't pull any punches. Don't limit yourself.' That was very liberating."

For one, that meant he could squeeze in a gag that he has been thinking about for years. The moment: when the guards protecting Sugar Rush's King Candy begin to chant "Or-e-o," a Wizard of Oz reference to the Wicked Witch's henchmen with a cookie twist.

There are other risks taken along the way, from Vanellope's initial brattiness to Calhoun's hilarious though tragic wedding-day back story — the result of Moore and other Simpsons cohorts sharing ideas with such Disney stalwarts as art designer Mike Gabriel (co-director of 1995's Pocahontas).

- New techniques. The animators were pushed to their limits to make each game environment as true to an actual replica as possible. The most difficult proved to be the most crude: Fix-It Felix. Artists struggled to simulate the staccato movements of the blocky characters and re-create backdrops that looked like pieced-together Legos.

"Here you are with the greatest animators in the world, asking them to create these guys who pop around a lot," Moore says. "Everything that is wrong in animation is right for this."

Still, it is Paperman, the accompanying short with Wreck-It Ralph by first-time director John Kahrs, that might be a true indication of animation's future. The wordless story about a love at first sight combines minimalist black-and-white computer animation with traditional hand-sketched images in a breathtakingly unique fashion. "I think it is a good indication of where traditional 2-D animation is going," Moore says.

What's up for Disney features next year? Another fairy tale, Frozen, which could be taken as a show of studio confidence or reliance on a sure bet. Like Tangled, it is loosely based on a classic story — The Snow Queen — about a clash between sisters that involves a journey across a treacherous frozen landscape.

"It's not a love story," assures Lasseter as he makes a case for upholding the studio's princess past. "I believe strongly that Disney needs to make these kinds of films. It is classically Disney, yet fresh and original for today's audiences. And not just for little girls."

[Polizzi]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph/

As of right now on Rotten Tomatoes:
All Critics: 85%
Top Critics: 100%

[Polizzi]

Top Critics Reviews as of Right Now on Rotten Tomatoes
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_i ... cs-numbers

ReelViews - 3/4

Wreck-It Ralph never does anything groundbreaking with this idea, but it's cute and clever and evokes nostalgia for gamers of the '80s and '90s.

San Jose Mercury News - 3/4

It's a fine piece of moviemaking that has a little something for kids who don't remember when games were played in arcades and adults who will delight in the tweaking of a bygone era.

Entertainment Weekly - B+

It doesn't quite carry the heft of Toy Story, but there's a lot of heart packed into these zeroes and ones.

It's unfair to compare most movies to Toy Story.

Film.com - A-

An adorable winner ...

Schmoes Know - 5/5

It's a great dynamic and it works but my favorite character isn the whole thing was Alan Tudyck as King Candy, such a hilarious throwback to the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.

Another Schmoes Know - 5/5

It was such a great time at the cinema; I was expecting to like it and I ended up falling in love.

Time Out New York - 4/5

The metaphor is clever, injecting real-life risk and reward into these beautifully artificial vistas, scored to composer Henry Jackman's Nintendo-worthy beeps and bloops.

Tampa Bay Times - B+

A delightful contrast to Moore's frenetic adventure is offered by an accompanying short subject Paper Man... the reason for the "plus" in my grade, and a likely Oscar nominee in the animated short film category.

Boxoffice Magazine - 4.5/5

Consider it a force in the Best Animated Film Oscar race

You'll find more there. Thank you.

[estefan]

Well, Roger Ebert ended up liking it.

Though, like a lot of his reviews lately, three quarters of it consists of simply plot summary. He seems to be getting really lazy in his old age.