Wreck-It Ralph Review

Gonna be honest here: despite being a fiend for animated movies, I wasn't particularly interested in seeing Wreck-It Ralph. It just looked like a lame Disney movie. It wasn't until I saw all of the insane amounts of fan art on tumblr that I thought, "Hmm, maybe I ought to check it out." Of course, the possibility that it might be nominated for Best Animated Feature was pretty encouraging, too. So, on my first night of Thanksgiving break I met up with my best friend, Olivia, who goes to Syracuse and who I hadn't seen in months, and we went and saw Wreck-It Ralph! Note that this is my first real review and so it's probably going to be bad, or weird, or something. Whatever.

Spoilers ahead, if you actually care about that.

Things I really liked about Wreck-It Ralph:

• John C. Reilly's voice. He did an absolutely amazing job, I thought. He managed to get just the right amount of bitterness and optimism in the performance. He's perfect.
• The Nicelanders. I loved how they were animated to have that jumpy, transition-less movement, and I loved how their little bodies were shaped.
• The fact that Jack McBrayer wasn't even acting.
• All of the cameos by the famous video game characters, especially Chun-Li and Cammy walking around Game Central.
• The "Mario is late" joke, which Olivia apparently didn't understand and had to think about for the whole movie and then a few hours afterwards before she got it.
• Sergeant Calhoun! She was perfect: Jane Lynch's performance, the tragic backstory, all of her little catchphrases. I repeat: perfect.
• Everything about Sugar Rush. Can this game please be real?
• Vanellope von Schweetz. I didn't think I was going to like her, because she looked kind of annoying, but I adored her character design and her plucky attitude and how cute she was and how cool the glitch effect was.
• The Oreo guards. "Oooooreo, oreeeeeeo."
• The kids in the arcade, especially the main girl player. She was a girl! They actually recognized that girls play video games! But the fact that she was a girl didn't seem weird or forced, it fit perfectly.
• The sexy-legs donut cops.
• The overall conflict of the movie: the whole fear of games being unplugged, and the idea of game characters going rogue, along with the Cy-bugs. They juggled the different layers of the conflict really well.
• The Turbo twist at the end, and the fact that I never saw it coming despite the fact that King Candy's presence in Sugar Rush bothered me throughout the movie. I wondered what the point of his character would be in a game about cute little racers, but it never occurred to me that he wasn't actually supposed to be there.

Things I didn't really like:

• The little gumdrop-looking guy who talked really slowly. I just didn't really like him for some reason.
• The use of Rihanna's "Shut Up and Drive" in the racing montage. This song is five years old. It was bad when it first came out and is no longer relevant.
• Why was Q*bert there? Seriously. Simply to demonstrate the plight of unplugged arcade games? I dunno.

I can't think of any other objections! It was a really great movie altogether. You should definitely check it out if you're a fan of animated movies, or family movies, or movies about video games. It was awesome! I give it eight out of ten stars!