Wreck-It Ralph

The adult take-away from Disney's superb animated feature Wreck-it Ralph is that life is a precarious balancing act between what we do for a living and who we are. Kids will not want to take anything away because they will not want to leave the spangling / eye-popping terrain inside their favorite joy stick games. Ralph is the "bad guy" in the popular Fix-it Felix Jr. (a game I'd never heard of before this film, much less played), who after 30 years trashing an apartment building and being tossed in the mud by angry tenants starts feeling stifled and a little envious of the game's hero, Felix, who cleans up Ralph's mess with his magic hammer. Ralph is voiced by the ever-affable John C. Reilly and Felix by 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer. After being rebuffed by the other characters in Fix-it and attending a group therapy session for other alienated arcade villains, Ralph gets the notion to prove he has the right stuff by entering other games to fight alongside the good guys, most notably Sergeant Calhoun (Glee's Jane Lynch) from Hero's Duty. If he brings home a victory medal, the other Fix-it characters have promised to treat him better. Ralph eventually ends up in Sugar Rush, a mind-boggling confection of a racing game where he meets the amped-up King Candy (voiced by Alan Tudyk, who channels Ed Wynn) and the spunky but glitchy Vannellope (Sarah Silverman). It's all delightful and funny and smart and potentially lethal for diabetics both for the sticky sweet wonderland that is Sugar Rush and for the sticky sweet sentiment at the heart of the movie. Recommended in 3D.