Wednesday, May 2, 2012

First Impressions: Wreck-It-Ralph

Hey everyone, welcome to another installment of First Impressions. Around this weekend, I'm going to be watching The Pirates! Band of Misfits, so expect a review on that movie sometime next week. Not long ago, Kevin called me and told me of an animated Disney movie about an evil video game character trying to be good. He also told me that there will be numerous amounts of other characters based on popular video game series making cameos similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit when there were cameos of a bunch of cartoon characters from different companies coming together. At first, I thought he was joking. But then, I looked it up online and he was telling the truth. Sorry I didn't believe you, Kevin. Coming around November is a new animated Disney movie called Wreck-It-Ralph. 


The movie is about an evil video game character named Wreck-It-Ralph, who is the main villain in an arcade video game called Fix-It Felix Jr. The concept of the game is that the hero, Fix-It-Felix, is fixing the buildings that Wreck-It-Ralph destroys. It's sort of like a mixture between Donkey Kong and Wrecking Crew for the NES. 

 


However, he's getting sick of being called the "bad" guy and he wants to prove to everyone that he can be good. But it isn't going to be easy since it's his nature to be the bad guy in the video game. It was the way he was programmed. He's hoping to prove them wrong.


He escapes from his video game and ends up in another one called Hero's Duty, a first person shooting game about the main hero named Sergeant Calhoun fighting against aliens called the Cy-Bugs. Although it kind of take on the name similar to Call of Duty, it's sort of looks like Halo and Space Invaders, with a color palette similar to Tron. 


Another video game he enters is a racing game called Sugar Rush. It's a colorful world filled with candy, cookies, and other sweets. He meets up with a female character named Vanellope von Schweetz who tells him that there's a huge threat that's going to affect her game as well as all of the arcade games. She blames Wreck-It-Ralph as the cause of this. He, along with other video game characters work together to stop the threat before the video game world becomes disastrous. 


Some of the cameos of video game characters that have been confirmed so far are as follow:

Dr. Eggman from the Sonic the Hedgehog series
Zangief from the Street Fighter series
Kano from the Mortal Kombat series
Bowser from the Super Mario Bros. series
Clyde from Pac-Man
Coily the Snake from Q-Bert
Dr. Wily from the Mega Man series
M. Bison from the Street Fighter series


Now, I'm both beyond skeptical and excited at the same time about this movie. I'm going to explain why.

Skeptical

General consensus have proven time and time again that movies based on video games mostly suck. Most of the time, they don't follow the original story line or concepts of the video game it's based on and makes it confusing for fans and movie goers. Sometimes, the problem is in the casting of the movie roles of the video game characters. Whether they look or act nothing like the characters they're representing, it makes some of these movies unwatchable. 

 




Another thing to mention is the plot is somewhat tiresome. We already had animated movies in recent years about a bad guy trying to be good, such as Despicable Me and Megamind. So, it's kind of a disappointment that they're going in this route instead of something completely different. But if they can put a different spin on it, then I can forgive that. But we'll see what happens.


Excited 

I love this concept! If Disney does this movie justice, then it will be fantastic. I mean, come on, doesn't it sound awesome? An animated movie based on video games with old school arcade characters, classic characters from games we grew up with as cameos, and traveling around a video game world. It's like Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Tron, that is amazing! It's being directed by Rich Moore, who was an animator for animated shows like The Simpsons and Futurama. The producers are Clark Spencer (who produced Lilo and Stitch, Bolt, and Meet the Robinsons) and John Lasseter (who was a director and executive producer of many Pixar movies), so I know that they'll do a good job. The voice cast also sounds pretty good, such as John C. Reilly, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch, and Sarah Silverman. 

I think that there might be a bright future for creating a movie based on video games if this is done right. I mean, if the movie adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World can get it right, then why can't this? We'll just have to see and find out this upcoming November. 





That's all for now. Tune in next time as I do a collaborative review of Pokemon: The First Movie with Fusionator from the website Manic Expression and a movie review of The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Hope to see you around Old School Lane real soon. Thanks for reading. Take care.

-Patricia


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