All images from The Art of Wreck-It Ralph by Jennifer Lee and Maggie Malone, published by Chronicle Books.

The Art of Wreck-It Ralph, by Jennifer Lee and Maggie Malone. Preface by John Lasseter.  Foreword by Rich Moore. 

San Francisco, Chronicle Books, November 2012, hardcover $40.00 (160 pages). 

This coffee-table art book presents, as it says, the art of the November 2 Disney animated feature, Wreck-It Ralph.  The authors are Jennifer Lee, a script writer on Wreck-It Ralph, and Maggie Malone, the director of development at Walt Disney Animation Studios who has worked on Disney’s Tangled, Tinker Bell, and The Princess and the Frog.  The Preface is by John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, and principal creative officer at Walt Disney Imagineering and the Academy Award-winning director of Pixar’s Tin Toy and a Special Achievement Oscar for Toy Story.  The Foreword is by Rich Moore, Wreck-It Ralph’s director.

Fix-It Felix, Jr.

As other reviewers have noted, Wreck-It Ralph does for arcade video-game animation what Who Framed Roger Rabbit? did for the classic animation characters.  Yet there is little in this art book on the other video-game characters licensed for guest appearances in Wreck-It Ralph.  The art presented is heavy on concept art, preliminary character design, and rough sketches of the main characters and settings, showing how Disney’s artists progressed from their beginnings to their final art design.

Wreck-It Ralph “explore[s] the hidden world of video games from classic 8-bit arcade games to the most modern and inventive offerings of the digital age.” (press release)  Ralph, the hulking bad-guy of the fictional 1980s 8-bit arcade game Fix-It Felix, grows tired of being cast as an unappreciated villain.  He escapes to the Grand Central Terminal-inspired Game Central, where he first tries out for the futuristic military action game Hero’s Duty (“When did video games become so scary!?”, Ralph moans), then for the more peaceful (he hopes) children’s candy-centered Sugar Rush.  In the latter Ralph meets his partner-to-be, the tomboyish (but ultra-cute) Vanellope Von Schweetz, and the Ed Wynn-inspired villain, King Candy.  Meanwhile, Felix and the other residents of the Niceland Apartments in Fix-It Felix realize that they are nothing without their loveable villain, and they set out to lure Ralph back.

The world of Hero's Duty.

Did you know that the character designers briefly considered Ralph and Vanellope as non-human characters; Ralph as a yeti, Sasquatch, or some other kind of monster, and Vanellope with green skin?  Ultimately it was decided that they had to look human to fit in with their surrounding cast.  Producer Clark Spencer and Art Director Mike Gabriel explain the rationale behind the decisions made, while providing many examples in usually full-color digital art, with some black-&-white graphite or brush pen sketches or storyboards.  As usual with animation art books, each sketch or digital painting is identified to its artist:  Bill Schwab, Jin Kim, Mike Gabriel, Daniel Arriaga, Wayne Unten, Cory Loftis, Kevin Nelson, Ryan Lang, James Finch. Doug Walker, Jeff Turley, Minkyu Lee, Victoria Ying, Lorelay Bove, Shiyoon Kim, Scott Watanabe, Brittney Lee, and many more.