![]() None of these games are real, but they feel real. ![]() Sugar Rush is an obvious Mario Kart clone, and its J-pop theme, which plays over the film’s credits, is a hilarious nod to some of the stranger games to come out of Japan. Hero’s Duty seems like an authentic first-person shooter in the vein of Halo and Call of Duty. The film’s arcade game Wreck-It Ralph looks like it came straight out of the early eighties. (See what I did there? No? Never mind it’s another gaming in-joke.) Besides its nods to specific games, Wreck-It Ralph is saturated with video game culture and history. ![]() ![]() The gaming references are icing on the cake, but the icing wouldn’t matter if there were no cake in the first place! In the case of Wreck-It Ralph, the cake is no lie. Wreck-It Ralph is peppered with video game in-jokes, but what matters is that the film’s settings seem like real games. Sure, there are a few obvious cameos from gaming icons like Bowser and Sonic the Hedgehog, but it goes so much deeper.ĭid you know, for example, that the combination King Candy uses to open his vault is the infamous Konami code? Then there’s the graffiti in Game Central Station that reads Aerith Lives: a pun on not only the memorable death of the Final Fantasy VII character, but also the Frodo Lives graffiti of the sixties and seventies. To my great astonishment and even greater delight, Wreck-It Ralph absolutely nailed its game-inspired settings. What did Disney bigwigs know about the game industry? (I’m exaggerating, but only a little.) Wreck-It Ralph is a movie about video games, and at first I wasn’t sure it would represent them well. The games I’ve played in my twenty-something years outnumber the stars in the sky. (You don’t need to see any of them to appreciate their lessons, but I highly recommend watching these movies anyway. (There have been, by my latest estimate, roughly 1,876 princesses in animated Disney movies.) Every one of them finds her true love and lives happily ever after in a blaze of fairy-tale romance. Then there are the princesses-by gosh, there are so many princesses. Roughly three-quarters of the way through the movie, a conflict or misunderstanding separates the main characters, only for them to be reconciled within ten minutes. Characters may burst into unrehearsed-yet-perfectly-performed song. The protagonist probably has an animal sidekick, and the leading lady invariably has a tiny waist. These films have distinctive tropes (storytelling devices) that show up constantly.įor example, in any given Disney movie, one or both of the protagonist’s parents are usually dead. Less polite words to describe Disney’s animated canon might be predictable, clichéd, and repetitive. I love Disney’s animated films, but I’ll be the first to admit they’re a bit… formulaic, to put it nicely. Let’s learn a thing or two from Disney, shall we? The movies may not be perfect, but there are concrete reasons they’ve been successful and you can put those things in your own work as well! Today we’ll dissect four lessons we can take away from a few of Disney’s latest animated features. Animated films often live or die based on their story and characters, so these aspects of film-making should be extremely important to all animators. As an author, storytelling is extremely important to me, and learning to study it is vital.
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