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philosoraptor42I've heard mixed reviews on both Wreck-It Ralph and Paranorman. I've heard some very high opinions of both and I've seen some shrugged shoulders over both of them too. Then again, I'd heard people even less impressed with Brave and I loved that, so once again my weird tastes are always the wild card here. After all, there's no such thing as objective quality when it comes to films. A film can be objectively very well made technically and yet be complete trash when it comes to entertainment value. Alternatively a film can be very poorly made and yet be really good fun. (For example, I actively accept that "Masters Of The Universe" is not a particularly well-made film, but I love the hell out of it and genuinely think it is a brilliant movie all the same.)
Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
I absolutely adore the initial section of this movie. It's great to see how the mythology of the film is established. We see a video games arcade with a community of videogame characters who can visit people in other games by travelling down the power cables. This initial set-up is very creative and seems to open up all sorts of possibilities.
Just like the premise of the "Toy Story" movies that wondered what happens to toys when you leave them on their own, "Wreck-It Ralph" considers what video game characters do when you leave the arcade. And the idea is that there are also a load of homeless game characters sitting in the power cable adapters having evacuated their disused arcade machines. So yeah, these days Q*Bert is homeless.
The eponymous character is the villain in a more retro yet popular game called Fix-It Felix, Jr. Ralph's job in the game is to destroy parts of a block of apartments and Felix's job is to fix the damage as quickly as possible with his special hammer. When a level is completed, the people who live in the partners get together to chuck Ralph off of the building. So when everyone leaves the arcade, the people in the apartments still resent Ralph for the damage he causes and at the same time Ralph resents them because he lives in a dump outside the building.
Ralph wants to be seen as equally responsible for the game's success as all the other characters and one particularly resentful character from the apartment block insists that he could never win a medal. So Ralph disappears into other games in the hopes of proving that he can win a medal.
Initially there are all sorts of game references and that's great, but I get the impression that the filmmakers got a bit tired of constantly having to come up with game references. At one point the game references seem to be switched for references to sweets. Ralph spends a large portion of the movie in a game called Sugar Rush, which for the record, features the most insanely catchy J-Pop theme song:
(video link)
I have a big problem with the decision to switch from jokes about video games to jokes about sweers, not least because I didn't really recognise half the sweet references. Case in point, the king of Sugar Rush threatens to send "devil dogs" after the protagonist. Turns out that a devil dog is actually a brand name for some kind of chocolate eclair sweet. There's also some kind of marching army of Oreos. Admittedly I HAVE heard of Oreos, not least because American programmes seem to make reference to them constantly, but they aren't really terribly popular here. And let's face it, I didn't sit down to watch a movie about sweets. I was expecting a movie about videogames. So that was irritating.
There's the little child racing driver character in Sugar Rush who befreinds Ralph whose name is Vanellope. She's voiced by Sarah Silverman and the voice acting is fine, but the character didn't feel very fleshed out to me. She felt a little uninspired. The basic gist is that her character is a glitch in the game and the idea is that Vanellope is an outcast for being a glitch just like Ralph is an outcast for being a game villain. However, the game starts becoming more about Vannelope's situation than it is about Ralph's situation and the two situations really don't complement each other that well. I felt the plot here wasn't really streamlined enough.
Not only that but the world of the Sugar Rush game is nothing like as pretty as the game had been before. It's very bright and very colourful, but yet somehow rather dull. Also the whole game appears to feature one single track, rather than the variety you'd normally expect in an exciting racing game. Essentially this new setting seems to be an excuse to make a load of sweet-themed jokes and it's a pity because I was really enjoying the film a hell of a lot prior to this change of setting. I enjoyed the mythology, I enjoyed the way the "Fix-It Felix Jr." game looked, I enjoyed the whole set of the "Bug Hunt" game. It had just generally been great fun.
I was much more interested in seeing Ralph get in trouble for trying to steal fruit from the Pac Man game or getting freaked out by the violence in a First Person Shooter. Also within the "Bug Hunt" game there's a rather awesome marine commander played by Jane Lynch who I would liked to have been more central. I recently saw the first season of "Party Down" and saw how great Jane Lynch is there and while in that she is in no way a no-nonsense character at all, somehow she just felt perfect for the role of hardened no-nonsense marine all the same. (Watch out for her 'game backstory'. It's hilarious.)
"Wreck-It Ralph" initially had a lot of promise and Ralph was a really interesting character, but in the end the movie just ends up being alright. It's entertaining enough. There's a plot that works well enough, with foreshadowing and a clear through-line from A to B. This is a good film and it's pretty funny too, but it didn't exactly blow me away, especially considering the possibilities that seemed to be set up at the start. It could have been funnier, it could have been prettier and the plot could have been more interesting. In the end, it's just fine and many people may enjoy it a lot (and with good reason). But it could have been better, particularly if it had decided to actually explore more of the exciting possibilities it lured me in with at the start.
B+
Paranorman (2012)
Paranorman is a stop-motion animation movie from the creators of Coraline (albeit not with Henry Selick as director). It starts off with a very funny spoof of an ultra-low-budget zombie film. The scene is perfectly appropriate for children, extremely amusing, but really captures the joy of low-budget horror films all the same. I am absolutely keen on horror aimed at children because I think they can handle a lot more than the censors would often give them credit for. I have many happy memories of watching "Gremlins", a 15-certificate movie, when I was around 7 or 8. Of course, this certainly isn't as scary as "Gremlins" and it doesn't need to be.
Watching the zombie movie at the beginning is our protagonist, Norman. Norman is able to see dead people and while that sounds highly familiar the take on it is very different from that seen in "The Sixth Sense". Heck, stories about children who can see ghosts have been around a very long time. Even Terry Prachett's "Johnny And The Dead" was around a lot earlier than "The Sixth Sense" and while the book seems to be so out of print that I cannot even find a plot synopsis, I'm sure the children's book "Ghosties and Ghoulies" that I had when I was young featured children seeing ghosts.
On top of the seeing dead people thing, Norman also lives in a town with a history of witch trials. He's informed by his crazy uncle that he is going to need to take over his uncle's reponsibility for keeping a witch's curse at bay. And not everything goes to plan with surprising consequences...
Norman is a big zombie fan. He's got a cool zombie alarm clock, posters related to zombies everywhere and the film is littered with references to horror movies which I found very appealing considering my recent sets of movie series, though I don't think there's anything too obscure here that children couldn't enjoy it too.
The effects in the movie are brilliant and inventive and the comic timing is fantastic. The film generally gorgeous, the plot doesn't progress the way you might expect it to and the fact that it's a children's film doesn't stop us seeing zombie limbs coming off every now and then.
The finale is extremely moving, which kind of a big requirement for animated movies these days, so high is the general level of quality of animated movies right now. Both this and Brave were nominated for the Animated Movie Oscar and while I loved both I'd probably just about rate "Brave" higher, but that's mainly just because "Brave" felt like a bigger movie. There's not a great deal in it. They are both great films. "Paranorman" is a fantastically funny movie and I loved it.
A+
Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
I absolutely adore the initial section of this movie. It's great to see how the mythology of the film is established. We see a video games arcade with a community of videogame characters who can visit people in other games by travelling down the power cables. This initial set-up is very creative and seems to open up all sorts of possibilities.
Just like the premise of the "Toy Story" movies that wondered what happens to toys when you leave them on their own, "Wreck-It Ralph" considers what video game characters do when you leave the arcade. And the idea is that there are also a load of homeless game characters sitting in the power cable adapters having evacuated their disused arcade machines. So yeah, these days Q*Bert is homeless.
The eponymous character is the villain in a more retro yet popular game called Fix-It Felix, Jr. Ralph's job in the game is to destroy parts of a block of apartments and Felix's job is to fix the damage as quickly as possible with his special hammer. When a level is completed, the people who live in the partners get together to chuck Ralph off of the building. So when everyone leaves the arcade, the people in the apartments still resent Ralph for the damage he causes and at the same time Ralph resents them because he lives in a dump outside the building.
Ralph wants to be seen as equally responsible for the game's success as all the other characters and one particularly resentful character from the apartment block insists that he could never win a medal. So Ralph disappears into other games in the hopes of proving that he can win a medal.
Initially there are all sorts of game references and that's great, but I get the impression that the filmmakers got a bit tired of constantly having to come up with game references. At one point the game references seem to be switched for references to sweets. Ralph spends a large portion of the movie in a game called Sugar Rush, which for the record, features the most insanely catchy J-Pop theme song:
(video link)
I have a big problem with the decision to switch from jokes about video games to jokes about sweers, not least because I didn't really recognise half the sweet references. Case in point, the king of Sugar Rush threatens to send "devil dogs" after the protagonist. Turns out that a devil dog is actually a brand name for some kind of chocolate eclair sweet. There's also some kind of marching army of Oreos. Admittedly I HAVE heard of Oreos, not least because American programmes seem to make reference to them constantly, but they aren't really terribly popular here. And let's face it, I didn't sit down to watch a movie about sweets. I was expecting a movie about videogames. So that was irritating.
There's the little child racing driver character in Sugar Rush who befreinds Ralph whose name is Vanellope. She's voiced by Sarah Silverman and the voice acting is fine, but the character didn't feel very fleshed out to me. She felt a little uninspired. The basic gist is that her character is a glitch in the game and the idea is that Vanellope is an outcast for being a glitch just like Ralph is an outcast for being a game villain. However, the game starts becoming more about Vannelope's situation than it is about Ralph's situation and the two situations really don't complement each other that well. I felt the plot here wasn't really streamlined enough.
Not only that but the world of the Sugar Rush game is nothing like as pretty as the game had been before. It's very bright and very colourful, but yet somehow rather dull. Also the whole game appears to feature one single track, rather than the variety you'd normally expect in an exciting racing game. Essentially this new setting seems to be an excuse to make a load of sweet-themed jokes and it's a pity because I was really enjoying the film a hell of a lot prior to this change of setting. I enjoyed the mythology, I enjoyed the way the "Fix-It Felix Jr." game looked, I enjoyed the whole set of the "Bug Hunt" game. It had just generally been great fun.
I was much more interested in seeing Ralph get in trouble for trying to steal fruit from the Pac Man game or getting freaked out by the violence in a First Person Shooter. Also within the "Bug Hunt" game there's a rather awesome marine commander played by Jane Lynch who I would liked to have been more central. I recently saw the first season of "Party Down" and saw how great Jane Lynch is there and while in that she is in no way a no-nonsense character at all, somehow she just felt perfect for the role of hardened no-nonsense marine all the same. (Watch out for her 'game backstory'. It's hilarious.)
"Wreck-It Ralph" initially had a lot of promise and Ralph was a really interesting character, but in the end the movie just ends up being alright. It's entertaining enough. There's a plot that works well enough, with foreshadowing and a clear through-line from A to B. This is a good film and it's pretty funny too, but it didn't exactly blow me away, especially considering the possibilities that seemed to be set up at the start. It could have been funnier, it could have been prettier and the plot could have been more interesting. In the end, it's just fine and many people may enjoy it a lot (and with good reason). But it could have been better, particularly if it had decided to actually explore more of the exciting possibilities it lured me in with at the start.
B+
Paranorman (2012)
Paranorman is a stop-motion animation movie from the creators of Coraline (albeit not with Henry Selick as director). It starts off with a very funny spoof of an ultra-low-budget zombie film. The scene is perfectly appropriate for children, extremely amusing, but really captures the joy of low-budget horror films all the same. I am absolutely keen on horror aimed at children because I think they can handle a lot more than the censors would often give them credit for. I have many happy memories of watching "Gremlins", a 15-certificate movie, when I was around 7 or 8. Of course, this certainly isn't as scary as "Gremlins" and it doesn't need to be.
Watching the zombie movie at the beginning is our protagonist, Norman. Norman is able to see dead people and while that sounds highly familiar the take on it is very different from that seen in "The Sixth Sense". Heck, stories about children who can see ghosts have been around a very long time. Even Terry Prachett's "Johnny And The Dead" was around a lot earlier than "The Sixth Sense" and while the book seems to be so out of print that I cannot even find a plot synopsis, I'm sure the children's book "Ghosties and Ghoulies" that I had when I was young featured children seeing ghosts.
On top of the seeing dead people thing, Norman also lives in a town with a history of witch trials. He's informed by his crazy uncle that he is going to need to take over his uncle's reponsibility for keeping a witch's curse at bay. And not everything goes to plan with surprising consequences...
Norman is a big zombie fan. He's got a cool zombie alarm clock, posters related to zombies everywhere and the film is littered with references to horror movies which I found very appealing considering my recent sets of movie series, though I don't think there's anything too obscure here that children couldn't enjoy it too.
The effects in the movie are brilliant and inventive and the comic timing is fantastic. The film generally gorgeous, the plot doesn't progress the way you might expect it to and the fact that it's a children's film doesn't stop us seeing zombie limbs coming off every now and then.
The finale is extremely moving, which kind of a big requirement for animated movies these days, so high is the general level of quality of animated movies right now. Both this and Brave were nominated for the Animated Movie Oscar and while I loved both I'd probably just about rate "Brave" higher, but that's mainly just because "Brave" felt like a bigger movie. There's not a great deal in it. They are both great films. "Paranorman" is a fantastically funny movie and I loved it.
A+
