Wreck-It Ralph

Rich Moore isn’t a director who plays it safe, and Wreck-It Ralph — released in 2012 — is proof of what happens when that restlessness meets a strong cast. You can tell a lot about a movie from its tagline, and “When the game is over, the fun begins.” gives away the game in the best way.

Strip away the craft and the premise is simple — Wreck-It Ralph is the 9-foot-tall, 643-pound villain of an arcade video game named Fix-It Felix Jr., in which the game’s titular hero fixes buildings that Ralph destroys. Wanting to prove he can be a good guy and not just a villain, Ralph escapes his game and lands in Hero’s Duty, a first-person shooter where he helps the game’s hero battle against alien invaders. He later enters Sugar Rush, a kart racing game set on tracks made of candies, cookies and other sweets. There, Ralph meets Vanellope von Schweetz who has learned that her game is faced with a dire threat that could affect the entire arcade, and one that Ralph may have inadvertently started. Carrying it all is a cast led by John C. Reilly, with Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch rounding out an ensemble that never feels wasted.

The reason people keep recommending Wreck-It Ralph usually has less to do with the plot and more to do with what it’s actually about. Threads of arcade and based on video game run through the film, giving the adventure elements an emotional undercurrent that keeps things from feeling weightless. You can also feel jail and medal working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

Labeled as adventure, animation, comedy and family, Wreck-It Ralph spends most of its runtime proving that genre tags are more like ingredients than instructions — Rich Moore blends them into something that reads as its own thing rather than a checklist of conventions.

Rich Moore’s handling of tone throughout Wreck-It Ralph deserves particular credit — it would be easy for a film juggling this many ideas to feel scattered, but the direction keeps everything pointed in the same direction. It also helps that Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch, Alan Tudyk are given real material to work with; none of them feel like they’re just there to round out a call sheet.

The runtime, 101 minutes, is used efficiently — there’s very little fat on this one. Behind the scenes, Walt Disney Animation Studios backed the production, giving Rich Moore the resources to fully realize the vision. Produced for roughly $165,000,000, Wreck-It Ralph eventually pulled in $471,222,889 at the global box office, well beyond what anyone expected going in.

This is a solid pick for anyone who wants their adventure with a little more substance than usual — put it on for a night when you actually want to pay attention. Nearly 14 years on, Wreck-It Ralph hasn’t lost much of its charge — if anything, it plays better with a little distance. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of Wreck-It Ralph, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail.