I could’ve sworn I’d written about this movie already. Years ago, in fact. Somehow, I had not. I’d failed to put it on this month’s schedule, even, because obviously I’d written about it before, and then I was looking up exactly what I said and I hadn’t. So yeah. Here is what I actually have to say on the subject.

Ralph (John C. Reilly) is the antagonist of the game Fix-It Felix Jr. The game cabinet is in an arcade full of vintage machines, and Ralph has been there for decades. Every day, all day, he destroys the building while Felix (Jack McBrayer) fixes it. At night, he goes to a villains’ support group. They’re celebrating the anniversary of the game, and Ralph isn’t even allowed at the party. He decides to prove his worth by getting a medal, because Felix has a medal and he doesn’t and maybe everyone will like him if he has one. This involves crossing into Hero’s Duty and Sugar Rush.

Honestly I have the deepest sympathy for Ralph. He really is just doing his job. Yeah, okay, he does break the building all day every day, but if he weren’t there, there would be no game. The Nicelanders are total jerks, frankly. They want Ralph to live in the garbage. He literally lives on the wrong side of the tracks from the apartment building. They’re afraid he’s going to go rogue, but what are they doing to make him feel comfortable in the game?

They’ve added Vanellope (Sarah Silverman, except voiced by her sister in the game) to my silly Disney game, and I can do without that. I like Ralph, but Vanellope is, well, a child. A particularly obnoxious child. She’s the kind of kid I wouldn’t have wanted to spend time around even when I was a kid, the kind who makes lots of bodily function jokes and is constantly putting people down. I get that she, too, is hurt and lonely, and she and Ralph bond over that, but I have a hard time caring because I wouldn’t want to spent time around her, either.

The voice-acting on this movie is choice. I like John C. Reilly and wish he’d make more movies I had the slightest interest in seeing. Jane Lynch is amazing as Calhoun of Hero’s Duty. This was the start of Alan Tudyk’s reign as King of the Disney Feature; here, he is doing his very best Ed Wynn impersonation and I love it. Any number of video game characters from real games are played by their real voice actors. Edie McClurg is always a joy, even if the character she’s playing is incredibly toxic—she’s basically playing Minnesota Nice here, which is arguably the perfect personality type for her.

It’s also full of video game references. I may not always get them; I don’t play a lot of classic video games. But I noticed the Konami Code as the code to the vault of Sugar Rush. About half the real characters were familiar. The varying styles of game animation were familiar, too, from the eight-bit of Turbo to the quasi-realism of Hero’s Duty. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that all the characters look roughly the same when they meet outside their games, but I imagine it makes the concept art easier.

Okay, so I was distracted from the movie itself by how much I loved “Paperman,” which debuted before it. It’s a fantastic short, and the movie’s merely pretty good. But it is pretty good, and it’s not the movie’s fault that it’s so overwhelmed by an outstanding cartoon. I still say the sequel missed a bet by not being called Ralph Wrecks the Internet, even if the name is less connected to the phrase they’re trying to call to mind. We all would’ve gotten it anyway.

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