Wreck-It Ralph is director Rich Moore's first feature film, but he's not exactly an industry novice.
Whatever your favourite episode of The Simpsons is, there's a good chance he directed it (he certainly directed mine, anyway, in 'Marge Vs. The Monorail').
After helping to establish the world of Springfield, he worked on Futurama, The Critic and Drawn Together, before his old CalArts classmate (and chief creative officer at both Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar), John Lasseter, recruited him to the Mouse House.
I talked to Moore about violence in video games, the early days of The Simpsons, and why Wreck-It Ralph feels more like a Pixar film than a Disney film.
I was surprised to learn that Wreck-It Ralph was a project that had been kicking around Disney for a while. How did you get involved?
I got involved with it right around the time I started working at Disney in 2008. It was presented to me as just kind of a notion that had been, as you said, kicking around the studio for quite some years. John Lasseter, who hired me at Disney, said, 'I know you're developing some ideas to pitch to me; I would love it if you would consider this idea, this notion'. So I said, well, what is it? And he said, 'it's a video game, a story that takes place in the world of video games and explores the lives of video game characters behind the scenes'. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool, that's pretty great, because I loved gaming as a kid and as an adult. I thought that idea could be something really special. It could be big and interesting and a great, great movie.
I asked John if I needed to go back to the material that'd been done before, or could I start from scratch, and John said, 'oh, I do not want you to look at what was done before, because no one was able to crack a decent story for it'. As a matter of fact, they'd put it on the shelf six months ago. So he wanted my take on it. I dug into it, and I figured that the action and adventure of video games... that stuff would come, that would be in the movie, but the story itself should not revolve around action. It needed to come out of our main character. What's going on with them?
And I landed on this idea that I really liked, of taking an old game character – a very simple game character – and have him at the point of his life where he's asking, 'well, what is life? What is the meaning of life, and what if I don't like what I'm programmed to do?' It seemed like the game characters have very little free will, and they're programmed to do these things day in and day out. What would it be like to be a video game character that wasn't happy?
I shared that with John, and he dug it too. It really started with that simple idea of a simple man, a Donkey Kong-esque kind of character, struggling with an existential crisis.
Yeah. What ate most of your quarters when you were younger?
Ha! Let's see... there was this pizza place near my high school when I was a sophomore and a junior, and they had this tabletop Pacman game. You know, it wasn't an upright cabinet, it was actually in a table, so you could sit there and have a piece of pizza and a Coke and just play. My friends and I, every afternoon, we would ride our bikes over to this place. Looking at games today... it was a pretty cheap date, you know? It doesn't compare to the games of today. But that was us, every afternoon. 'You gonna go play Pacman? I'm gonna go play Pacman.' We'd hang around there all day; our after school life revolved around a tabletop Pacman in a pizza place. So it ate a lot of quarters.
Another one, although I don't think it ate as many quarters, was the game Dragon Slayer. Do you know anything about that game?
Don Bluth?
Yes! Yes! The one with the 2D animation. I loved animation, and this was like the perfect marriage of my two loves, animation and video games. My god, if they had gotten Star Wars in there somehow, that would have been the trifecta. But that one, I spent a lot of money on. An unhealthy amount of money. Because I wanted to get to the end on my own, and not have to watch somebody else play it. I spent a lot of quarters doing that.
Do you think games have changed for better or worse since then? Obviously there's that part in the film when they're in Hero's Duty, and Ralph says, 'when did video games get so violent and scary?' But at the same time, Hero's Duty looks like it'd be a pretty fun game to play...
Yeah! Yeah, no, I really don't think they've changed that much, except that the graphics have gotten better. I hear people say, 'oh, video games are so violent now! They depict such horrible violence, and they weren't that way when they first started with Pong and Space Invaders.' But I think back, and right next to Space Invaders in a pizza place I used to go to – this is a different pizza place; I spent a lot of time in pizza places as a kid, that's what's coming out of this interview – there was a game called Death Race 2000.
There it was, right next to Space Invaders, and the object of it was to drive your car around and run over pedestrians for points. It was bloodthirsty! It was horrible! But it had very, very simple graphics, kind of like Space Invaders or Asteroids. It was really violent, and the only difference between it and modern games is that the graphics weren't as good. I think the content has always been... there will always be a violent component to some video games, and I think we've just become very good at depicting it very realistically. Really, I don't know if they're any more violent than they were.
When people say video games cause violent behaviour or whatever, how do you feel about that?
I mean, I can only speak for myself. I played a ton of 'em and I've not harmed anyone in my life. It has not manifested itself in that way. But perhaps for other people, it has. When my kids were young... they're older now, but when they were young I would just say, 'okay, this game is not appropriate for my kids'. If I was playing something that was violent, I would put it away and we'd play Mario Kart together, you know?
I don't know. People used to say that when I was a kid about cartoons, too, that cartoons cause violence. You know, kids see people getting hit on the head with anvils and shot in the face with shotguns and it's turning our kids into monsters! I don't know. Most of the people I know who watched cartoons and work in animation today are... I wouldn't say perfectly normal, but they're pretty normal people. I think that if someone has the tendency to be violent, they're going to be violent no matter what. Whether they play a video game or if they don't. So... I think that's just the way it is.
Yeah. You've been in the industry a long time, but this is your first feature film – were there any big surprises?
I would say the machine, the production machine, just how big it is, that's pretty amazing. How fast that machine gets going when you're in production is pretty remarkable. Not to say that something like The Simpsons doesn't have a great production machine behind it, but Disney... that's something unique. It really feels like a gigantic locomotive. I don't know what to compare it to, but it's bigger than anything I've ever worked on. When it's piloted correctly... man, it's pretty great. It's a boy's dream come true. It's like that old saying, that a Hollywood studio is like a big toy train. I find Disney is like that, but it's not a toy train. It is a train. A full-sized train! You know? Once you get it running and it starts moving, it's quite a ride.
But really, as different as the mechanics of the production are, the goal of the director is no different if I was on Simpsons, Futurama or Wreck-It Ralph. It's to tell a great story with characters we can relate to and care about and root for, within a world that feels real, that we want to invest time in and visit. I think that's The Simpsons, I think that's Wreck-It Ralph, I think that's any good piece of entertainment. Regardless of whether it's animated or live action or whatever.
Yeah. Wreck-It Ralph has an amazing voice cast, and you mentioned your work on The Simpsons and Futurama. Have you noticed a change in the way that big name actors view working in animation?
I haven't noticed a big change, but I do think it's really cool that they do consider doing shows like this. When you get someone who's really, really good... it's a different kind of acting skill, and I'm very lucky to have worked with people who really understand how to put the performance in their voice. They're not relying on body language. Even though they are using body language when they're recording, the emotions come through in the voice. I think John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman are just naturals at that type of thing. Jon Lovitz, who I worked with on The Critic, has one of the classic kinds of voices for animation, where the emotion just comes through so nicely.
I think that whole Simpsons cast is amazing. It's one of those things that was put together many, many years ago, for the interstitials on The Tracy Ullman Show, and who would have ever imagined that those short cartoons would spawn this TV show that's gone on for 23 years? That group was just perfect. You could not have cast a better group of people, and that casting was initially just for some short cartoons. There was never this plan that it was going to be anything bigger, but it couldn't be more perfect.
Before The Simpsons, you obviously studied animation with a lot of the Pixar guys. To me, Wreck-It Ralph feels more like a Pixar film than a traditional Disney film. Conversely, Brave felt more like a traditional Disney film than a Pixar film.
Yeah, and that didn't go unnoticed by the people at the studio. When we were working on Wreck-It Ralph, people would say, 'wow, Brave really feels like something we would have done here, and this feels like something Pixar would have done'. I don't really know what that means, you know? I'm not quite sure exactly how that happened. The films just come from the filmmakers, and I never said, 'oh, I'm going to make it feel more like a Pixar movie'.
Maybe it's got to do with what you said, that I went to school with a lot of the guys who established Pixar. I think that maybe what you're noticing is that the Pixar films and Wreck-It Ralph feel very much like CalArts films. That's where we all went to school, and that's the predominant sensibility of Pixar. A lot of their creative process was born in the classrooms at CalArts. So when you're describing a Pixar feel, I can go a little bit deeper and say, 'oh man, it feels like Cal Arts, it feels like our early student films'. I think that's where the similarity between Wreck-It Ralph and the Pixar brand comes from, because we're all kind of cut from that same cloth.
That still doesn't answer where Brave came from, because Brenda Chapman, who developed that story, was also a classmate of ours. But I think she was going for more of a traditional fairytale-type story. We may never know.
Do you think, with John Lasseter's dual role at Disney and Pixar, there'll be more of that overlap in the future? That it will become harder to tell Disney films and Pixar films apart?
Well, I think there'll always be something of a fairytale quality to Disney films. Even in Wreck-It Ralph, I think it has more of a feel of it being a morality tale, more like a Pinocchio or those old, classic Disney films, but I don't know. It could be. I know coming down the pike, the slate for the future of Disney animated films, it's very diverse.
There are still a lot of traditional ideas in the works that people will recognise and be able to say, 'oh, that feels very Disney', but there are some very unique films in the works at the moment. Films that make you say, 'wow, that's new, that's different', and I think that's really great for the studio. I feel really fortunate to be at the studio at this time in it's life. It does feel like it's taking some chances, and trying different things it may not have ten years ago or fifteen years ago.
Disney films are known for their musical sequences, and you directed my personal favourite animated musical sequence in 'Marge vs The Monorail'. Were you tempted to throw a musical sequence into Wreck-It Ralph?
We were, at one point! We actually wrote a song for King Candy. He was going to break into song at one point in the movie in a different iteration of the plot, and it seemed like a really good idea, but it was just not right for the tone of the movie. But I think it would be cool to explore... if this was, like you say, more of a contemporary Pixar movie than a traditional Disney movie, what would a more contemporary Disney musical be like?
I loved those episodes on The Simpsons where they had musical numbers. They were really fun. I loved working on those. I think it'd be really cool to explore what that type of movie could be, an animated musical that wasn't rooted in traditional Broadway song-and-dance numbers. I don't know what that is, but it'd be fun to play around with.
Maybe we'll see that from you one day. For now, thanks for taking the time to talk.
Thank you very much! It was a real pleasure speaking with you.
Wreck-It Ralph levels Australian cinemas up on Thursday December 26.
