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Breaking out of the Box
So, my thoughts on Wreck-it Ralph. First off, it's easy to compare it to the Toy Story movies, since it also creates a universe in which characters come alive when humans aren't around, but I also see similarities with Monsters, Inc.; in that a big old lummox with a soft heart finds true fulfillment as a kind of surrogate father. Yet another movie with a metaphor for parenthood; hooray! If only they'd consider having a mother-figure as the protagonist instead of a father-figure every once a while....but that's all by the by. I want to talk about this movie as a story that advances feminist themes. And by feminist I don't mean passing the Bechdel test (it does, but mostly only with scenes wherein the catty girls pick on Vanellope, and that kind of stinks) but by picking apart the notion of arbitrary roles.
Roles are a fundamental discussion point of feminism, and that's not just the roles that women play or are expected to play. It extends to all the categories we like to shove people in; male or female, child or adult, good guy or bad guy. Creating roles or pigeonholes isn't all bad; in fact, organizing people into groups is an ability that's crucial for healthy child development. It's just important that, as we mature, we learn there are more nuances and shades than our initial simplistic categorizing would imply. For a simple, superficial example, it's incredibly limiting to assign pink to girls and blue to boys. A little boy thinks he can't play with an EZbake oven because of its colors? Sad. On the converse, girls feel they have to limit themselves to the pink aisles in the toy store? It's time to break out of that box.
Ralph needs to be a "bad guy" to function in the basic good-bad world of the video game. But his real problem is that his fellow Fix-it Felix characters have embraced the notion too fully, treating him like a bad guy even in the more complicated world outside the gameplay. I would say their attitude is the problem much more than Ralph's. However, the story is about his journey, so he learns to find the heroic part of him elsewhere. I suppose he could have been happy at the end, knowing he has a little girl who admires him, even if the others had never learned to treat him better. But of course that would have felt like a terrible injustice to us in the audience. Felix himself is a fun character - they could have made him the villain if they wanted to take the obvious choice, just flipping the roles. But it's more interesting, and funny, to have someone who wants to fix everything in the game or out, who wants everyone to get along and like each other.
Which brings me to Calhoun. I would take much more issue with a female character in such a stereotypical role, except that they openly address how stereotypical it is. A tough woman always has a tragic past; surely she couldn't just be tough on her own. Well, she's been programmed to have a tragic past. That really made me crack up. What a great way to deconstruct the contrived nature of The Tortured Woman with a History. Now, I'm not sure how I feel about her marrying Felix. On the one hand, falling for a goody-two-shoes is a nice twist, and maybe a way of breaking out of her programmed role. On the other hand, did she only fall for Felix because of his resemblance to her programmed lost love? And did she have to become a love interest at all? Oh well. I'm sure the main goal of her characterization was to be funny, and that certainly achieved its goal.
Vanellope was a fun character by and large, though I have little patience for potty humor myself. Probably because she's a child rather than a grown woman, she managed to escape the usual roles of romantic interest/damsel in distress (Vanellope and Ralph help each other out, a mutual arrangement as opposed to a rescuer/rescuee dynamic). Her secret backstory was a nice reveal, and it was gratifying to see a female reclaim a role that had been stolen from her by a domineering man.
(Spoilers!) King Candy/Turbo was a fantastic villain. He was the epitome of someone who couldn't let go of the role he'd been assigned. He defined himself solely by his status as Greatest Racer Ever, and allowed that rigidity to destroy everything around him. Though the characters compare him to Ralph, he actually has the opposite problem. Ralph doesn't want to stay in the role he's been assigned, and at first he doesn't understand that he can still play the bad-guy role in the game without embracing it in real life. Turbo, on the other hand, wants to keep hold of his role so completely that he loses the distinction between games and reality. He's the only character who takes on multiple guises - the king, the nasty-bug hybrid - and yet he never allows himself to be anything other than the number one racer. In contrast, Ralph takes on a number of disguises, from the armor in Hero's Duty to the inadvertent candy shell in Sugar Rush, but underneath he is essentially the same, a good-hearted guy trying to find a way to be a hero. You can shift roles, or even ignore them entirely, without losing the true essence of yourself. That's a message I can get behind.
Roles are a fundamental discussion point of feminism, and that's not just the roles that women play or are expected to play. It extends to all the categories we like to shove people in; male or female, child or adult, good guy or bad guy. Creating roles or pigeonholes isn't all bad; in fact, organizing people into groups is an ability that's crucial for healthy child development. It's just important that, as we mature, we learn there are more nuances and shades than our initial simplistic categorizing would imply. For a simple, superficial example, it's incredibly limiting to assign pink to girls and blue to boys. A little boy thinks he can't play with an EZbake oven because of its colors? Sad. On the converse, girls feel they have to limit themselves to the pink aisles in the toy store? It's time to break out of that box.
Ralph needs to be a "bad guy" to function in the basic good-bad world of the video game. But his real problem is that his fellow Fix-it Felix characters have embraced the notion too fully, treating him like a bad guy even in the more complicated world outside the gameplay. I would say their attitude is the problem much more than Ralph's. However, the story is about his journey, so he learns to find the heroic part of him elsewhere. I suppose he could have been happy at the end, knowing he has a little girl who admires him, even if the others had never learned to treat him better. But of course that would have felt like a terrible injustice to us in the audience. Felix himself is a fun character - they could have made him the villain if they wanted to take the obvious choice, just flipping the roles. But it's more interesting, and funny, to have someone who wants to fix everything in the game or out, who wants everyone to get along and like each other.
Which brings me to Calhoun. I would take much more issue with a female character in such a stereotypical role, except that they openly address how stereotypical it is. A tough woman always has a tragic past; surely she couldn't just be tough on her own. Well, she's been programmed to have a tragic past. That really made me crack up. What a great way to deconstruct the contrived nature of The Tortured Woman with a History. Now, I'm not sure how I feel about her marrying Felix. On the one hand, falling for a goody-two-shoes is a nice twist, and maybe a way of breaking out of her programmed role. On the other hand, did she only fall for Felix because of his resemblance to her programmed lost love? And did she have to become a love interest at all? Oh well. I'm sure the main goal of her characterization was to be funny, and that certainly achieved its goal.
Vanellope was a fun character by and large, though I have little patience for potty humor myself. Probably because she's a child rather than a grown woman, she managed to escape the usual roles of romantic interest/damsel in distress (Vanellope and Ralph help each other out, a mutual arrangement as opposed to a rescuer/rescuee dynamic). Her secret backstory was a nice reveal, and it was gratifying to see a female reclaim a role that had been stolen from her by a domineering man.
(Spoilers!) King Candy/Turbo was a fantastic villain. He was the epitome of someone who couldn't let go of the role he'd been assigned. He defined himself solely by his status as Greatest Racer Ever, and allowed that rigidity to destroy everything around him. Though the characters compare him to Ralph, he actually has the opposite problem. Ralph doesn't want to stay in the role he's been assigned, and at first he doesn't understand that he can still play the bad-guy role in the game without embracing it in real life. Turbo, on the other hand, wants to keep hold of his role so completely that he loses the distinction between games and reality. He's the only character who takes on multiple guises - the king, the nasty-bug hybrid - and yet he never allows himself to be anything other than the number one racer. In contrast, Ralph takes on a number of disguises, from the armor in Hero's Duty to the inadvertent candy shell in Sugar Rush, but underneath he is essentially the same, a good-hearted guy trying to find a way to be a hero. You can shift roles, or even ignore them entirely, without losing the true essence of yourself. That's a message I can get behind.
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Since you compared it to a Pixar movie, you'll be amused to hear that the Seattle Times front page banner on the day it was released called it "Pixar's Wreck-It Ralph" (one of A's officemates took a photo and put up another one from a few years ago advertising "Pixar's Bolt"). Apparently a joke in circulation is that this year Disney and Pixar traded places; Pixar released the princess movie and Disney did the "Life From The Perspective Of A [Blank]", in this case, a video game character :).
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