A kingdom with no ruler: The current animation landscape...

For the second year in a row, Pixar will not have anything close to the best animated film of the year and will not have the highest-grossing animated film of the year, not worldwide anyway. This is not a rant to bag on Pixar, as they will be fine (I'm optimistic that they are merely experiencing growing pains) and I'm more curious to examine what the animation field looks like without an uncontested leader. The critical disappointments of the likes of Cars 2 and Brave along with the lack of any guaranteed masterpieces for a little while puts Pixar in a position where it's now just 'one of the guys'.  Disney has been trying to reclaim its once-uncontested title, but it too now sits in a position where it's 'just one of the gang', as there is no guarantee that the likes of Wreck It Ralph will even out-gross The Lorax domestically (worldwide, Tangled was the first Disney toon to top $350 million since Tarzan back in 1999).  Critically, Disney has not had an out-and-out gem since Meet the Robinsons back in 2007, where it was matched by Pixar's Ratatouille.  So the question becomes what does the animation landscape look like when neither Disney or even Pixar is the uncontested king of the proverbial hill?  The answer is somewhat more exciting than you'd think.

Having your cake and eating it too: Discussing the somewhat troubling finale of Disney's Wreck It Ralph.

Spoiler warning... this whole essay is discussing end-of-film events of Disney's Wreck It Ralph.  Like in the first sentence, so beware!!!
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When is a Princess Story not a Princess Story?  That's the question that's haunted both of Disney's major animated efforts this year.  While Brave has gotten raves elsewhere (not here) for focusing on a young woman who doesn't want to get married, the film is at its core a loose variation on The Little Mermaid save for the fact that said princess doesn't want a man quite yet.  But despite marketing efforts that focus exclusively on Ralph (John C. Reilly), Wreck It Ralph is actually a two-pronged narrative, telling what amounts to a buddy film in which both Ralph and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) have their respective goals and desires.  The would-be glitch in the racing game Sugar Rush merely wants to race and be accepted for what she is, while Ralph merely wants a better life and for those in his game to understand that he's just playing a role, that he's not actually a villain.  The film's duel goals come to a head at the third act, when Ralph is informed by King Candy that if Vanellope races and wins, the compound effects will be the destruction of the game, the homelessness of its inhabitants, and the death of Vanellope, since as a glitch she would be left behind as the game cabinet is unplugged.  It's a stunningly powerful story turn, the idea that Ralph realizes that he must do something horrible (wreck Vanellope's race car and renounce her goals) in order to be 'the good guy'.  It's heroism in the Jack Bauer mold rather than the clear-cut heroism of, for example, Mr. Incredible.  But the film reverses itself almost as quickly, exposing said story turn as a fabricated lie and setting up Sugar Rush's ruler as a scheming villain who has brainwashed the citizens and denied Vanellope's true nature.  And what is Vanellope's true nature?  Why she's a princess of course!

Weekend Box Office (11-04-12): Wreck It Ralph sets a Disney animation record while Flight soars to $25 million on just 1,844 screens.

The holiday season started off with a bang this weekend, with three major openers, all of which over-performed or opened within reasonable expectations.  If Wreck It Ralph's (review) estimate holds, it will have the biggest three-day debut for a non-Pixar Disney cartoon ever.  Believe it or not, a regular Disney toon has never opened at or above $50 million over a Fri-Sun period.  To be fair, The Lion King's $42 million debut back in June 1994 would equal around $75 million today and Tangled earned $48 million on the Fri-Sun portion of a $67 million five-day Thanksgiving opening.  Still, with $49.1 million, Wreck It Ralph managed to top every non-Pixar animated feature that has opened in this holiday kick-off spot save Madagascar 2's $63 million opening in 2008.  It opened higher than A Shark Tale in 2004 ($47 million), Chicken Little in 2005 ($40 million), Flushed Away in 2006 ($18 million), Bee Movie in 2007 ($38 million), A Christmas Carol in 2009 ($30 million), Megamind in 2010 ($45 million), and Puss In Boots in 2011 ($34 million over Halloween weekend and another $33 million over this weekend last year). Inflation and 3D-bumps aside, this is a strong debut for a rather crowd-pleasing cartoon that should play well for the rest of the month even with heavy competition in three weeks from Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians.  Like pretty much every major Disney cartoon since Bolt four years ago, this film is being touted as Disney's return to glory, but merely doing the numbers means that the Mouse House has a pretty big hit on their hands.

Wreck It Ralph vs Flight in the Weekend Movie Preview.

Easily expected to be the biggest film this weekend, Wreck-It Ralph is the latest release from Disney Animation. The plot follows Ralph, the protagonist in the fictional video game Fix-It Felix, who tires of being the bad guy and leaves his game to find another in which he can become a hero. Along the way he encounters Tamora Calhoun, a sergeant in the Call of Duty/Halo style game, Hero's Duty and Vanellope von Schweetz, an 8 year old girl in racing game, Sugar Rush. But while Ralph is trying to realise his dream, Schweetz discovers a problem within her own game, one that could have dire consequences not only for the cast of Sugar Rush but the entire arcade - and it looks like Ralph leaving his own game could be the cause of all the problems. Development on Wreck-It Ralph began a number of years ago, as an idea from story artist Sam Levine. At that point the picture was known as Joe Jump and featured an over the hill character attempting to make the transition into modern videogames. Levine was making good progress on the project (enough for a rough synopsis to turn up online) but when John Lasseter took over as head of Disney Animation in 2006, the status of Joe Jump became unclear. While the Pixar honcho let Levine (and his writer) work on the project for a further year, it began to languish, and with little sign of moving forward, Joe Jump was put on the shelf and Levine was assigned to another project. While Lasseter was impressed by the core idea, he wasn't sold on the story itself. 

Review: Wreck It Ralph (2012) doesn't reinvent the wheel but merely reaffirms the Disney template.

Wreck It Ralph

2012
100 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

It is perhaps slightly disappointing that Disney's latest animated feature is not so much an example of branching out so much as pouring the same drink into a new glass.  Just as Pixar's Brave (review) seemed like an attempt to fit alongside the standard Disney princess mold, so too does Wreck It Ralph  (trailer) exist as a Disney cartoon that would rather have a Pixar logo at the front.  But in the end Wreck It Ralph is a Disney cartoon through-and-through, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  It is vividly animated and generally entertaining, and it uses its video game settings as the basis for any number of clever jokes.  But truth be told the film is not really about video games, merely using the video game format as a colorful wrapping for a rather conventional story.  In hindsight its story is actually somewhat generic, not going as far off the reservation as Meet the Robinsons (review/essay) or even Bolt.  It's a witty and charming film, but it's slightly dispiriting how often it teases us only to skirt back to genre convention.

Watch/Discuss: Disney's Wreck It Ralph gets a charming trailer, with a shocking number of licensed video game characters along for the ride.

First and foremost, I am shocked that Disney was able to get the rights to so many classic video game characters.  At the very least I see characters and/or settings from Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Cuburt, Street Fighter II, House of the Dead, Halo, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat, and Pac-Man.  One only hopes that the already acknowledged difference between older arcade games and hyper-intense newer titles leads to some kind of social commentary/satire, but this looks like a wonderfully creative little cartoon no matter how deep it ends up being.  The voice casting seems solid, and it appears that Disney even went and hired the original game vocalists when possible (for example, Gerald C. Rivers reprises his work as M. Bison). Offhand, I see at least three major female characters without a token love interest in sight, so that's icing on the cake.  Anyway, this looks like exactly the sort of 'off the beaten path' animated features that Disney should be making.  Wreck It Ralph opens on November 2nd, 2012.  As always, we'll see.

Scott Mendelson