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Wreck-It Ralph review

If there's never a movie based on Mario Kart, then this will be the closest we'll come to one. It was a surprise when watching this today to find so much of the screen time devoted to the fictional kart-racing game Candy Rush (I expected from what I'd read about the film that it would be mainly set in Hero's Duty) but the Candy Rush part of the film captures the essence and feel of a Mario Kart film better than any other racing spectacle in a movie. Even better than Speed Racer does.

And what about the rest of the film?

Well, the game world of Wreck It Ralph is so unfair before the end of the film that you actually find yourself feeling sorry for the arcade game's villain Ralph. I never thought I'd find a film where I'm rooting for someone portrayed as a stereotypical villain to win but here you really root for Ralph given that pretty much everyone is an absolute dick to him. Usually you'd expect that to be a criticism for a film but of course here it's not given that Ralph is also our protagonist of the film.

Hero's Duty is interesting in the small amount of screen time it takes up. It's fun to see how the hectic world of a HD first-person shooter compares to the more Donkey Kong-esque rinse and repeat routine of Fix It Felix Jr. The great thing is that there's so many little touches in this film that there's an immediate difference in the way Sergeant Calhoun moves in comparison to a Fix It Felix Jnr or Candy Rush character. The characters in Hero's Duty move more slick, whereas in Fix It Felix the characters have more stop-motion movements similar to those in The LEGO Movie and Candy Rush characters all skipping around as you would expect from child-friendly games.

The film is like an amazing hybrid of Toy Story, Monsters' Inc and Mario Kart. It has Toy Story's intriguing question of 'What happens once you've stopped playing?' applied to videogame characters, the quirky monster society of Monsters' Inc only with Q*Bert and co instead and the craziness of Mario Kart. None of this makes the film feel unoriginal but instead it helps create the kind of masterpiece you expect to find in a brilliant animated film. You really care and feel for the characters in the film, you really feel a sense of peril when something goes wrong, you really laugh when something funny happens (I loved Fix It Felix's 'I'm hopless, it's hopeless!"). It's like all the best animated masterpieces and that's because it draws inspiration from them. From Ralph going through a similar life lesson to Buzz Lightyear to villain King Candy being like an evil version of Woody due to his jealousy towards a more successful kart-racing game than the one he stars in, Wreck It Ralph is a brilliant animated film that learns from the very best of animated movies and kart games.