Getting To The Next Level

When director Rich Moore joined Walt Disney Animation Studios and began developing “Wreck-It Ralph,” he had a big problem. “Arcade-game characters have no free will,” he says. “They’re programmed to do one thing day in and day out—they don’t have a choice in the matter. I thought, ‘That’s boring.’”

 

Or is it?

 

“I realized it’s actually a great conflict,” says the director. “Within this world, there are strict rules: you do one job and one job only. What if there was a character who didn’t like his job?”

 

THE STAR IS BORN

At nine feet tall and 643 pounds, Ralph is certainly a force to be… well, wreck-oned with. He’s a massive guy charged with wrecking the apartment building in a place called Niceland. Much to Ralph’s dismay, a spry sport named Fix-It Felix Jr. is called on to fix the building and save the day with his magic hammer, earning cheers, accolades and a fancy gold medal from the Nicelanders. 

 

“Ralph is the bad guy in an old 1980s arcade game who’s wondering—after 30 years of playing his assigned role—‘Is this it?’” says Moore. “So, like a lot of us, he tries to solve an internal problem with an external solution: he’s going to try to win a medal—if he could win just one, he thinks he’ll earn the kind of love and respect Felix gets.”

 

“So Ralph embarks on this journey across the arcade to try to earn that medal,” says  producer Clark Spencer. “Of course, the real journey is for him—and everyone else—to realize that while he’s programmed to be one thing, it doesn’t mean that’s what he is on the inside.”

 

Ralph’s quest will take him from his home in the game Fix-It Felix Jr. into the vast worlds the arcade has to offer. “We jump from Ralph’s very simple 8-bit world to Hero’s Duty,” says Spencer. “Hero’s Duty is a modern, first-person shooter game—it’s brand new, the best game in the arcade, the most advanced game out there. In this game, Sergeant Calhoun heads up a platoon of soldiers fighting off Cy-Bugs that are annihilating the universe. It’s very intense.”

 

According to Moore, Hero’s Duty is loaded with detail even gamers will appreciate. And the tone?  “It’s gritty,” says the director. 

 

Calhoun and Ralph don’t exactly see eye to eye. Beyond squashing every last one of the Cy-Bugs, Calhoun’s only mission at the time is to get Ralph off her turf. But he spies the one thing he covets—a medal—and he makes it his mission to get his oversized hands on it. His efforts go awry and Ralph finds himself jetting from the tough world of Hero’s Duty to something a little sweeter—literally.

 

“Sugar Rush is a 1990s cart-racing game set in a world that’s made entirely out of candy,” says Moore. “So this world is more whimsical. It’s got a classic Disney feel mixed with an anime influence.”

 

“But while it has a sweet veneer,” adds Spencer, “there’s a dark side to Sugar Rush.” 

 

There’s also a scrappy little girl named Vanellope von Schweetz who’s the first to spot Ralph. “Vanellope lives on the fringes of Sugar Rush,” says Moore. “She’s a glitch—a programming error—so she’s ostracized from the activities of Sugar Rush and has to take care of herself. Ralph and Vanellope don’t really like each other at first—she gives him a hard time—but they start to realize that they’re a lot alike. They’re both misfits.”

 

Ralph learns that Vanellope is on her own quest to join the ranks of the Sugar Rush racers, even though none of the other Sugar Russians support her. As a result, she’s developed a tough exterior and a sharp tongue to go with it. But Ralph can take it—the verbal sparring between the two leads to a real friendship between them. And Vanellope—through her plight—opens Ralph’s eyes to what it really means to be a hero. 

 

“A good movie makes the audience feel like they’ve journeyed with the characters,” says Moore. “I think the audience will expect comedy and action. They’ll expect the state-of-the-art animation and spectacle that still blows me away. But I think they’ll be surprised by how much heart the movie has and how much they’re going to love these characters.”

 

GIVING VOICE

“Wreck-It Ralph” features more than 180 unique characters—more than three times the average animated film. Each character needed to be designed with a unique personality and in most cases, given a voice. Filmmakers called on TV, film and stage stars to help bring the characters to life, including John C. Reilly (“Chicago,” “Step Brothers”) as the voice of Ralph. “When we were talking about making the main character a ‘bad guy,’” says Moore, “we knew we needed someone the audience could get behind—support and love, even though he’s kind of rough around the edges. John inhabits the characters he plays and he connects to the humanity. He brought a lot of himself to Ralph, too, which is amazing.”

 

According to the director, Fix-It Felix Jr. was tailor-made for Jack McBrayer (“30 Rock”). Jane Lynch (“Glee”) lends her voice to Sergeant Calhoun, a character that really came together once filmmakers saw what Lynch was bringing to the performance. “She’s everything you love about Jane Lynch—with an action-adventure twist. It’s very funny and exciting.”

 

When it came to Vanellope, filmmakers knew what they didn’t want. “We didn’t want a child to play the part,” says Moore. “We wanted someone who was acerbic and quick, and could carry the more serious parts of the performance. We all know Sarah Silverman is funny—she’s a comedian. But Sarah’s a great dramatic actress as well.”

 

With a phenomenal cast in place, filmmakers decided to maximize the performances by creating a unique opportunity to pair up cast members during their recording sessions. “In animation, we typically record the actors by themselves—it’s a good process, it works,” says Moore. “But a big part of my job is making the movie feel like it’s happening before the audience’s eyes as if it’s just been captured on film and not worked on—frame by frame—for years. So to get a certain spontaneity in the performances of the actors by allowing them to work together—to look each other in the eye and act and react while recording their voice tracks worked really well. It became a very collaborative room—me, the writers, the actors. It got crazy at times, but that’s when we knew we were getting close to finding gold.”

 

BREAKING THE MOLD

Create four distinct worlds?  No problem. Develop three times the studio’s average number of characters? Consider it done. Record the talent together? Sure! Take world-renowned talent and vast knowledge of animation back some 30 years to achieve a believable 8-bit arcade-game world? 

 

Not so fast.

 

“We work at a studio known the world over for its innovation and artistic excellence—particularly now,” says Spencer. “It’s not easy to tell animators who’ve spent their entire careers working to create the best, most sophisticated animation that the world of Fix-It Felix Jr.—Ralph’s ‘80s-era arcade game—must be extremely simple.” 

 

Spencer says that while Fix-It Felix is realized in CG with fully sculpted characters, the overall design was created to feel like an 8-bit world—rudimentary with simplified characters that move on a grid—up and down with no diagonal movement.

 

Says Moore, “Everything from the art direction, animation acting and camera moves to the music and lighting is very simple, which is a huge contrast to the rest of the worlds.”

 

“Our animators have been taught to make the best animation in the world so they had to learn to think differently,” says Spencer. “It took a lot of work to figure out how to pull back and make it authentic, but when the first couple of scenes came in and we saw how cool it was and how much it added to the overall film, everyone got excited.

 

“The irony is that, in this case, pulling back—simplifying things—was actually innovative, taking the pioneering spirit that built Walt Disney Animation Studios to a whole new level,” concludes Spencer. “In the end, we all had to go on a little journey—like Ralph does in the movie—to find our way home.”