I knew Wreck-It Ralph was going to be good, but I didn’t know it was going to be this good! I can’t remember a cartoon kiddie movie with this many layers, with this much devastation and with more twists and turns than your average Sugar Rush race track. There were several moments in the film where I was very surprised at the latest turn of events, but also in awe at just how well-structured those events were. Wreck-It Ralph is made with obvious forethought, setting up many plot points and story threads that pay off with delightful glee in the end.

Wreck-It Ralph is the rare kids’ movie that doesn’t hold your hand or soften its blows. And for that, I loved it!

Movie rating: 5/5: Great!

Kids are not idiots. When you’re making entertainment for kids, you don’t need to talk down to them and you don’t need to pander to them. Kids may not understand more complex concepts, but deep down, they understand and can appreciate the difference between comedy and tragedy. Wreck-It Ralph is one of those movies that expects its viewers to think, to understand a character’s complex motivations. Why does Ralph want to be a good guy? What does it mean when he hurts his friend in order to help her? These are not simple matters of good guy and bad guy. Ralph can’t just win a medal and expect everything to work out all hunky-dory. He has  to earn his happy ending – and believe me, he does!

The characters are especially fantastic. John C. Reilly as Wreck-It Ralph is a great leading man, who really comes through in the end. Jack McBrayer is a little grating as Fix-It Felix Jr., but then I mostly just feel that way about Jack McBrayer. Alan Tudyk makes a surprising turn as the Candy King, who is a far more complex character than one might think. And the great, glorious Sarah Silverman is beyond adorable as Vanellope the glitch. She has all the cutes. There isn’t a bad character in the bunch.

In a match up between Pixar’s Brave from earlier this summer and Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, it should be no surprise that the one filled to the brim with video game references is by far the best. Suck it, Pixar.

Join me after the jump for the full review. There will be full SPOILERS!

It’s about time somebody made a really good video game movie. I guess it helps that Wreck-It Ralph isn’t based on any existing video games, and instead simply embraces the fun and excitement of gaming in general. As my regular readers know, I’m a huge video game fan. So it’s a delight to see such a wonderful picture paying tribute to one of my all-time favorite hobbies. Wreck-It Ralph is filled to the brim with sly references, blink-and-you’ll-miss Easter Eggs and direct shout outs to famous games. Sonic the Hedgehog has a few cameos, and my favorite had to be seeing ‘Aerith Lives’ and “Sheng Long Was Here’ written in graffiti. Classic.

The story of Wreck-It Ralph is actually rather deep, with multiple plots and subplots coming together to just build and build into an epic climax. It starts with our hero (or is it our bad guy?) Wreck-It Ralph, the villain in the classic arcade game called Fix-It Felix Jr. Every time the player puts in a quarter, they watch as Ralph smashes and destroys a highrise apartment building. Then it’s up to the player to control Felix to fix the building and defeat Ralph, saving all the townspeople. Pretty standard old arcade classic.

Does anybody even remember arcades?

But Wreck-It Ralph is similar to Toy Story in that, once the gamers all leave the arcade, the characters in the games come to life and live their own little lives! And they can stay in their own video games, or they can go visit the video game hub central station and hang out with characters from other games. Hence all the cameos we saw in the trailers. After 30 years of being the bad guy, Ralph is starting to get depressed. He lives in a dump, and he has to watch as the townsfolk shower Felix with praise and a bright, shiny medal. Ralph tries to find help at his Bad Guy Anonymous meetings, but the other villains just don’t understand. Ralph doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore. He wants to be the hero, he wants to get the medal and the praise.

“Thank you, Satan.”

Then after a heated confrontation at Felix’s 30th anniversary party (to which Ralph was not invited), Ralph decides to go out and get himself a medal in a different game! Then he’ll get the respect he feels he deserves. So Ralph jumps into Hero’s Duty, an epic sci-fi first-person-shooter, set in a harsh alien landscape battling evil psy-bugs. And the worst thing about the psy-bugs is that they don’t know they’re in a video game. They don’t calm down when it’s game over, and have to be dealt with by the game’s all-purpose bug zapper. The animators really go all out in this section, creating a harsh, dark alien world that is completely unique from the other video game settings. They did a great job differentiating locales.

Ralph ends up winning a medal when he goes rogue in the game, but an accident in the psy-bug egg chamber sends Ralph and a baby psy-bug rocketing out of Hero’s Duty, into the game hub central, and then blasting into the Mario-Kart-like Sugar Rush, a candy-themed racing game staring adorable little pixie avatars. It’s here that Ralph meets and befriends one of the racers, the quirky Vanellope von Schweetz, played to the height of adorability by comedienne Sarah Silverman.

Sadly, she forgoes her usual potty mouth

Well they don’t start out as friends. Vanellope actually steals Ralph’s medal to use as payment to enter the next qualifying race. You see, Sugar Rush is a racing game where 9 new racers are picked every day for the players to choose from. And inside the game world, all the various Sugar Rush citizens compete for those 9 slots. But Vanellope is an outcast and is never allowed to race because she’s a glitch, and is constantly glitching out. But with Ralph’s medal, she sneaks her way into a slot in the qualifying race.

Already you can see this plot is getting long, because Wreck-It Ralph is just so filled with story! Ralphs helps Vanellope build a race car in a fun mini-game sequence, because if she wins, she promises to get him his medal back. And Ralph sides with Vanellope after he sees her being bullied by the other racers. The scenes of Ralph and Vanellope bonding are delightful as they build her car, escape the game police and then start training her to race in the bottom of Diet Soda Mountain. It’s all fun and excitement and frivolity – but then, like I said, this movie just gets devastating. And I can’t believe they went there.

On the morning of the big race, Ralph is approached by King Candy, the loveable, cheerful leader of Sugar Rush’s candy kingdom. He solemnly explains to Ralph that the reason they won’t let Vanellope compete is because she’s a glitch, and if she makes it into the game and players see her glitching, then they’ll think Sugar Rush is broken. Then the manager of the arcade will likely shut down the game. The other characters will be able to flee into the game hub central station, but Vanellope, being a glitch, is unable to leave her game and visit the hub. She’ll be trapped inside Sugar Rush when it’s shut down.

Ralph believes King Candy. And in an absolutely heart-breaking scene, Ralph smashes Vanellope’s race car to pieces, while she’s forced to watch and cry for him to stop.

This car, right there, the one they built together. He freakin’ wrecks it!

This scene was just nuts! I thought for sure that Felix or somebody would come along and stop Ralph. Or that he’d have a change of heart and help Vanellope even if it meant the game would get shut down. But no. He smashes the car to pieces. And the little girl is crying her eyes out at the betrayal.

It’s heart-breaking.

And that’s what I meant by the movie not holding your hand or pulling its punches. Not only does King Candy’s speech make total sense, but the audience completely understands why Ralph has to smash that car. King Candy tells Ralph that sometimes heroes have to make the hard decisions, and he’s absolutely right! I really hope kids understood all of this, and understood the moral dilemma facing Ralph. Because I think this was powerful stuff for a kids film.

Of course, the movie is not yet over. Ralph returns to his own game with his medal, but his heart is broken and it just doesn’t matter anymore. He also learns that, after he left, the arcade manager feared that Fix-It Felix Jr. the game might be broken. So he’s going to shut down the game! To prevent this, Felix went out into the game world to find Ralph, joining forces with Commander Calhoun, the badass, tough-as-nails space marine chick from Hero’s Duty. The romance between Felix and Calhoun is a little silly, but I suppose it works. Again, I just mostly don’t care for Jack McBrayer.

At least Calhoun is incredibly badass

So the movie all comes to an epic climax in Sugar Rush, on the day of the big race. Ralph apologizes to Vanellope, Felix fixes her race car, and she enters the race, proving herself to be quite awesome. We learn that King Candy is actually the bad guy, despite being all loveable and funny earlier in the film. I did not see his bad guy turn coming. It was very well done. And it seems that King Candy messed around with the programming code of Sugar Rush, turning Vanellope into a glitch in the first place.

So while Vanellope races King Candy, Ralph, Felix and Calhoun do battle with a psy-bug invasion, after Ralph accidentally trapped that baby bug in Sugar Rush. The swarm of millions of psy-bugs threatens to devour all of Sugar Rush, and Vanellope with it, since she can’t flee the game for being a glitch. There’s another heart-breaking scene where she tells Ralph to go on without her – but Ralph isn’t going to do anything of the sort! He rushes back into the game world with a plan to destroy the psy-bugs and the new psy-bug infused King Candy!

I loved the climax of this movie. Ralph sacrifices himself to kill all the bugs, and gets a few moments to recite the Bad Guy Anonymous affirmation in the process. It’s a very touching and badass moment. I’m not ashamed to say I teared up a little. Especially when Vanellope came racing in her car to save Ralph’s life at the last minute!

Because that’s what friends are for

Ralph is a surprisingly deep character. He isn’t looking for glory just for glory’s sake. He just wants to be appreciated and have some friends. He doesn’t want to be alone anymore. And he makes some very difficult decisions, and is able to make up for the mistakes he’s made. He’s a true, wonderful hero by the end. And John C. Reilly disappears into his voice. This is total Ralph. Vanellope is just as adorable as you can imagine. Smart, silly, determined and just a little too naive to understand why Ralph is hurting her. She has some really powerful moments, but always brings it back to being cute.

Fix-It Felix is OK, but again, meh to McBrayer. Jane Lynch as Calhoun is fun, and a great character, but she’s kind of saddled with Felix for the whole film. Not her fault. I thought King Candy was great. He’s not some mustache-twirling villain. Heck, I didn’t even think he was the villain for most of the film. Sure he’s working against Vanellope, but he has a very good reason for that – at least at first, because then you find out he was mostly lying. Still, great work with King Candy as the surprise villain.

His candy should be black licorice

I really loved Wreck-It Ralph. The story is mesmerizingly complex and surprising, with real emotion throughout. When Ralph smashed the race car, I lost it. When Ralph saved the day in the end, I lost it. This movie had me. If I were to make any complaints, they might be that I just didn’t care much for Felix Fix-It Jr., and the movie also spent a little too much time in the brightly-colored, candy-coated world of Sugar Rush. Just like candy in real life, too much of it at once can get all icky and kind of gross. Candy loses its appeal when you spend more than an hour with it.

Fortunately, Wreck-It Ralph as a whole just gets more appealing the more time you spend with it!

Also, if you see Wreck-It Ralph in theaters, you’ll probably also get to see the animated short Paperman. It’s a delightful black and white cartoon (seemingly mixing hand-drawn animation and CGI) about a man trying to get the attention of a pretty lady by shooting paper airplanes at her. It’s adorable and sweet, and in the end it’s very romantic. My girlfriend loved it more than Wreck-It Ralph, so that’s saying something. She’s got good taste.

I found my perfect girl with the help of e-mails

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What did you all think of Wreck-It Ralph and Paperman? Wonderful? Horrible? What video game Easter Eggs did you catch? Let me know in the comments!