by Guest Reporter Blake Hill

Wreck-It Ralph, as some may know, is an upcoming Pixar movie based on the digital frontier – the world of video game characters.  The main character is actually villain of an old 8-bit game in an arcade, who is tired of being assigned the role of a bad guy and abandons his game to try and change his programming.  The director of Wreck-It Ralph, Richard Moore, spoke about the development of the movie’s story, assisted by a writer and several of the storyboard artists.

Moore revealed that originally, the movie was meant to be focused on the hero of the movie, Fix-It Felix, who goes around repairing the damage Ralph does in the game.  However, as the team tried to write the story from that angle, they found it lacked traction, and ultimately Moore realized that there would be more conflict and drive to a movie motivated by the improvement of the bad guy than the hero.  To this end, the artists regularly drew up new variants of the storyboards, and Moore gave them a free hand to develop additional story arcs and character developments as they saw fit.  Many versions of each scene were drawn, reviewed, broken down to components that were working (or not), and reassembled to be the best that they could be.  For example, Ralph started out looking like a furry sasquatch, but was ultimately converted to an large man with oversized hands.  The panel was also shown a short scene that originally had a near fight between Ralph and the spunky little girl character, Penelope, which Felix was forced to intercede on and try and repair; in an updated version, with Felix removed from the scene, it becomes a development of a relationship between the two that resembles the childish arguments of  siblings.

Moore was more than willing to do as much analysis, breakdown, and rebuilding of the story as needed, because he wanted to create a story that had a full family wide spectrum of appeal, such as he had experienced when watching The Jungle Book.  Judging by the scene we were shown, Penelope and Ralph will provide plenty of humor in their antics, adrenaline as they break the rules of their digital society, as well as heart, as they both try to find a new place for themselves in a world that has their lives pre-programmed.

Besides the ‘duty’ jokes, this movie should also provide and unusual chance to see a large number of classic video game characters brought to life with far more pixels than they were originally born with. The cameo list should include representatives from Pong, Pac Man, Burger Time, Street Fighter, Paper Boy, Dig Dug, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario Brothers, and more.  Moore claimed most companies were more than happy to have their characters involved, but that doesn’t mean that some won’t be left by the wayside due to branding concerns or legal technicalities – though one storyboard artist said she would have been ready to quit if they had cut Qbert from the mix.

While Pixar will keep us waiting until November to push START on their newest creation, they do have a playable version of the Wreck-It Ralph video game on their website, in the iTunes store, and even available in actual arcade cabinets in a few locations, such as Horton Plaza, just a few blocks from SDCC.

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