Last Wednesday, to kick off the four-day weekend, I saw the animated movie Wreck-It Ralph. The titular Ralph is the villain in a (fictional) old-school arcade game, but these days he's thinking he'd finally like some positive attention from the egg-shaped people that he works with intra-game. One of them suggests that a big shiny medal would prove that Ralph is actually a hero, so that becomes an excuse for Ralph to cross over to other games and set the narrative ball rolling.
Tasha Robinson's review of Wreck-It Ralph at the A.V. Club already explains most of my feelings about the movie, but she only mentions in passing a detail about those egg-shaped people that stayed with me far longer than you would have thought (which would be approximately no time at all, really). Keep in mind here that their game is of about the same quality as the original Super Mario Bros.:
The visual gag contrasting those subsidiary characters' smooth, modern CGI design with their [i.e., the egg people's] ultra-jerky 8-bit movement is one of the best subtle jokes of a movie thoroughly packed with them.
(By the way, this is one of the best subtle insights of a review thoroughly packed with them.)
Robinson doesn't make much of this minor note, but it struck me as quietly brilliant. I think that's because the joke only works if you — like me — have been paying at least a little attention to the development of video games from 1985 to today. In practice, this means the gag is easy to get for a lot of people under 40. This funny type of motion is not something that we think much about, but it's instantly recognizable from all the hours we spent with the earliest video games. I played my first games on my cousins' Atari and my own 8-bit Nintendo, so this stop-start animation, as specific as it is, seems totally native to me.
But not everybody is going to get that, because this feeling of familiarity has got to be at least partly generational. Wreck-It Ralph requires you to be of a certain time in a way that not a lot of movies do. This becomes clear when you compare it to the Toy Story movies. The contrasts between Wreck-It Ralph and Pixar's tremendously popular franchise are significant precisely because the movies share so much in common, as Robinson points out:
Both address what those playthings — some of them original creations, some of them familiar, nostalgia-evoking icons — do in their downtime, when no human beings are looking; both draw on the irresistible idea that the rich, elaborate lives children imagine for their toys aren't an illusion, but are just the tip of the iceberg compared to their actual worlds.
(Those are her italics.)
Also, both of these domains, toys and computer games, are ephemeral. That's a fancy way of saying they are lowbrow commercial culture, exactly what you'd suspect of being very generation-specific.
The Toy Story trilogy, however, is not really that generation-specific at all. Toys were a whole category of thing that would have been understandable 50 years ago, even if Buzz Lightyear was not necessarily a toy a designers would have thought up back then. (I'm hedging my bets with "necessarily," but in fact it seems likely to me that they could of.)
But explaining to a kid from 1960 the concept of video games — and the entire reasoning behind animating those egg people as strangely jumpy — would require a convoluted explanation, possibly involving diagrams and expressive gestures. Wreck-It Ralph is a lot more locked to its cultural moment than the Toy Story movies ever were. The Toy Story view of childhood is a Platonic ideal (and idyll) that had barely been updated from "Leave It to Beaver." Even many of the toys seem antiquated.
Video games are relatively young, and for better or worse we're only seeing now what it means to have them as an integral part of the culture, complete with their own portfolio of visual artifacts. Along with all of that, as a society we've begun to wrestle with the idea that video games may be worthwhile or even necessary. In the doc Indie Game: The Movie, there's a great rant by Phil Fish, a game designer who makes the case, plausibly, that games are the ultimate art form. The thing is, I actually almost agreed with him when I saw the film, a reaction I'm pretty sure nobody would have had 20 year ago. Now, it almost seems like an obvious idea, even if it's still controversial.
The accretion of interactive entertainment history has other implications. In Indie Game, you can see a lot of Fish's game, Fez, and it's clear that as a piece of art it means a lot more if you get its visual allusions to the look and feel of the earliest games. Unlike the original Super Mario Bros., modern games now have three decades of history to refer to subtly or blatantly. When Fish explains some of the ways Fez looks back to the original Nintendo, the game comes across as a kind of Kill Bill of video games — as interesting for its appropriation and recombination of existing material as for its originality.
So this was why Wreck-It Ralph's primitive video game characters and their caffeinated manner of moving seemed like such a genius stroke: Their awkward relationship to modern video game characters has only really become possible recently. By being a throwback, they're, like, totally now.
