There are people that we tend to ignore their importance in our lives as time passes. Day in day out, as we continue to become more focused on our own self, they become a nobody, just someone annoying, just someone that badly needs to be controlled; and if things turn real bad or not as we want them to be, we freak out, we put the blame on them. They become the villain, us, the hero of our story. And this is what the movie Wreck-It Ralph is about. Disney’s latest animated movie which has a video game villain as its hero imparts another lesson-filled story to its viewers.
Wreck-it Ralph is the antagonist of who lives in one of the arcade’s video games and who, after years of playing the bad guy, got tired of being the outcast and eventually leaves his Atari-resolution-like Fix-It Felix Jr. game world to look for his own hero medal. He shortly finds his coveted medal in another video game by pretending to be one of the bug fighters in Hero’s Duty, an action-packed first-person futuristic shooting game.
Ecstatic of his first ever hero medal, he clumsily breaks a bug egg, steps into a space capsule and ends up in another video game, Sugar Rush, where he meets the witty girl named Vanellope von Schweetz who steals his newly acquired shiny medal and uses it to join the race she has been longing to participate. Ralph soon learns, however, that like him, Vanellope is also an exile of the confectionery world where she resides. And so seeing that they have something in common, they strike an agreement to beat the odds. But it was short-lived.
After breaching a deal that is supposed to make him get his prized possession back and her winning the game’s race, Ralph later finds out that Sugar Rush’s King Candy is actually Turbo, a character of the video game Turbo-time that was permanently unplugged long time ago. Angered by the loss of his own game, Turbo sets revenge by infecting other games but finally settles in Sugar Rush and decides to change Vanellope from being Sugar Rush’s key player to just someone considered as a glitch. Turbo also made other racers believe that she is a threat that will lead to the demise of the whole game thus the utter hatred aimed at her. Stunned by this discovery, Ralph breaks Felix Jr. free from King Candy’s lair, where he has been jailed after stepping on a trap while on his quest to bring Ralph back, and had him fix the young girl’s car and gets her back ready for the race.
But while the cars made of anything sugar battle for first place, the sole bug that Ralph accidentally brought with him inside the space capsule has hatched more eggs underground. Mayhem soon ensues as in the middle of the race, the bugs spring out of their breeding place and terrorizes all the sweeties. The odd tandem of the short and bubbly Fix-It Felix Jr. and slender, feisty and armor-clad Sergeant Calhoun soon arrives to the rescue, albeit still outnumbered. In the midst of the melee, Ralph suddenly recalls how the bugs got defeated in Hero’s Duty and then devises a way to reproduce the ray of bright light that attracts and eventually kills all the flying adversaries.
In the end, Felix Jr. marries Calhoun, Vanellope gets her main spot in Sugar Rush and Ralph goes back to his Fix-It Felix Jr. environment, still the bad guy but with realization that his role and others is what makes the video game a video game – with a hero and a villain. Perhaps this is a fact of life. Perhaps it is also what parenting should be like. No one can claim to be a good parent without a challenging kid, and not one kid will be known as a good child without a strict parent – just like us right now, bad guy and good guy, Wreck-It Rafael and Fix-It Cris, not in particular order.
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Mood: 1/10 Honks! (It’s Marcus’ 4th year.)
Marcus Can Blog 