DVDizzy Forum

We were shown about 25 minutes of the movie, and though we had already seen some of it at Comic-Con, there was quite a bit of new footage that hadn't been seen yet. We were shown a scene in which Ralph heads from his Bad Anon meeting back into Niceland and realizes the town is celebrating the 30th anniversary of their game without him. Felix and the rest of the citizens are having a party on the top floor of their building (complete with some pretty slick dance moves) and they're horrified when Ralph crashes the party. This is the point where he decides to go after a medal in another game, which happens to be the FPS "Hero's Duty."

Jane Lynch voices Calhoun, a tough-talking Sergeant who leads the troops of "Hero's Duty" against Cy-Bugs in intergalactic war. A lot of discussions were had about the look and feel of this game-within-a-film, with triangular shapes, grey colors, and neon green highlights emerging as the most important visual elements. We saw a sequence in this environment rendered layer by layer, adding debris, flashing lights, and smoke to the original pre-vis until the end result resembled something like "Halo" or "Call of Duty" modern FPS. Hilariously, we also saw what the player looks like in the world of the game: a Wall-E-like robot with a screen for a face and two human arms that stick out to look like a guy holding a gun. It's a cool design, and a great example of how this movie makes us look at the world of video games in a slightly different way.

From there, Ralph crash lands into "Sugar Rush," the Mario Kart-esque racing game made entirely of candy and inspired by Dr. Seuss style architecture of Antoni Gaudi. We spend about half of the movie in this game world, and this is where Ralph first meets Vanellope. She takes him back to her place and Ralph discovers that they're kindred spirits: Venellope is a glitch in her game, shunned by the other characters just like Ralph is. She lives in the Diet Cola Hot Springs, an abandoned mess of a place inside a volcano with Mentos hanging like stalactites. (They occasionally drop into the soda "lava", resulting in an explosion that comically burns Ralph.) He smashes her a race track ditch in the ground and teaches her how to drive so she can practice and he can return home, and it's clear he develops a soft spot for the quick-witted girl.

Jumping back into Wreck-It Ralph to finish the day, we spoke in small groups with the film's director Rich Moore and producer Spencer Thomas about the film near the end of the day. Moore revealed that he actually began this project with Fix-It Felix Jr. in mind as the main character.

"Early on... we were approaching this that this was going to be Felix's story, and starting him out as a good guy and ending up as a better guy just wasn't a very compelling story. So Ralph existed as this supporting character to Felix, and Phil Johnston, the writer, and I said, 'Well, what about Ralph? This would be an interesting character to watch go through this kind of process of becoming a bigger person, a better person, a less selfish person.' The story really got traction at that point. It really started to take off."
We also learned that the movie had a few other previous incarnations, going under the titles of High Score and Joe Jump over the years. In keeping with the video game theme, one of the film's coolest elements is that they use characters we know from real video games. But even with those cameos, the designers still had their work cut out for them. Mike Gabriel, the film's art designer (who directed Pocahontas and Rescuers Down Under), said that the cameos only make up about 20% of the characters in the movie and that the filmmakers had to still create more characters than any other film in the history of Disney animation to round out the rest. There were 188 original characters created for this project, which is a staggeringly high number when you consider most animated movies only have 40-60.

Before Wreck-It Ralph, Disney had unsuccessfully been developing two video game films: High Score and Joe Jump. Moore ignored both of them.

Joe Jump tells the story of a video game character from the Pac-Man era whose game is no longer played. He finds a way to "jump" into today's high-tech games and then begins the "fish out of water" story.

Sam Levine wrote:Created, co-wrote with Jared Stern and directed development of my original animated feature about a retro videogame character jumping into modern games to reinvent himself.

"Joe Jump". Project was shelved in 2008, when I decided to create elsewhere. It has been since been reworked and renamed Reboot Ralph, then Wreck It Ralph.

DisneyDude2010 wrote:Whoa alot of good stuff there! And the talk of a sequel already?!?!

Disney's Divinity wrote:

DisneyDude2010 wrote:Whoa alot of good stuff there! And the talk of a sequel already?!?!

Reminds me of Treasure Planet, where they had a sequel and a TV series already lined up. I think the same thing happened with Atlantis: The Last Empire... Disney has a tendency to overestimate how their "boy's" movies will do. Their ambition is killing them. (I personally wish they had been too far along on TP stuff that to go back, so we would've got a TV show and sequel, however brief/measly. I would've liked to have seen more of Jim.)

Unfortunately, it seems that the powers that be are a bit afraid of some of the film’s intricacies. In addition to all the beautiful animation, [...] the movie also features a lot of potty humor. Like, a. Lot. Of. Potty. Humor. I’m pretty sure that every single scene we were shown had at least one joke about peeing one’s pants, homophone confusion between Hero’s Duty and Hero’s Doody, or some other scatological theme.

Everything else is awesome, but the extreme childishness of these jokes is way out of place and below the standard of the film’s other elements. I doubt they will be enough to make viewers dislike the film, but it’s a little disappointing to see.

DisneyAnimation88 wrote:If other test audiences respond in the same way as this reviewer, perhaps Disney will remove some of those jokes.

Disney's Divinity wrote:Well, it was kind of expected with Sarah Silverman.

PatrickvD wrote:But then I love my American Dad, Futurama and Family Guy.

Nobody cared about the load of fart and burp gags in The Lion King.