Barely two years ago, nobody could have seen it coming. Pixar was blasting through the animation world with the emotional and flawless Toy Story 3, arguably their greatest masterpiece yet. Meanwhile, the Walt Disney Animation Studios was starting to rehearse a comeback with Tangled, a traditional fairy-tale told with modern quirks and executed with a brilliancy that was true to the companys traditions. Now, here we are, sitting at a point where Pixar has delivered one major thud - Cars 2, and one good movie that failed to achieve greatness due to production issues - Brave; and the Disney Animation Studios is proudly showing Wreck-It Ralph to the world, a movie that the current Pixar would have certainly been happy to produce.

Wreck-It Ralph does precisely what Pixar used to do so well and so often: it takes a mundane concept - giving life to videogame characters - and pulls a great script right out of it, introducing dashes of creativity and life in the charming little details of the world. In many ways, Wreck-It Ralph is an electronic version of Toy Story. Where Woody and company struggled with the shackles of their existence as toys with human emotions, Ralph and his crew face different, and yet similar, more technological dilemmas. Ralph is a villain who, after being constantly mistreated by his arcade-machine peers for thirty years, decides to flee from his game, go to the arcade hub and find another game where he can win a medal in order to become a hero and show his worth.

His escape triggers chaos all around the arcade: his game glitches and starts running the risk of being shutdown, and the games he visits start having their normality humorously disrupted by an alien character, much to the shock of in-game characters and arcade users. In a curious twist of fate, Ralph comes across another outcast like himself: Vanellope, a racer on the delightfully designed Sugar Rush - a girly racing game built around all sorts of candy - who is shunned by other racers for being a bug in the system. Screenwriting is amazingly solid, and the movie moves along in a fantastic pace that alternates videogame references, frequent changes of scenario and sweet character development. Better yet, the movie is impressively smart in keeping its cards close to its chest, but not too close to obscure conclusions and assumptions from fans; the result is a series of great and truly unforeseeable plot twists, which is a rarity for movies of the genre.

If there is a complaint to be made about Wreck-It Ralph is its humor. It is not that there isnt any, the problem is how irregular it is. Gamers all around will be delighted by its inside jokes, and random references to either famous or more unknown titles; and children will be delighted by the poor easy jokes delivered by characters. The core issue here is the lack of a more universal humor, something that Disney tends to do in such a seamless easy manner. While the gamer-focused jokes display the movies incredible research work, the juvenile wisecracks tend to border on embarrassing, which goes against the general intelligence of the movies script. Fortunately, there are still a few moments of good-hearted humor that will make the whole family laugh out loud together, even if those moments should have appeared more often.

The result of all things combined is simple: Disney has a gem on its hands. Wreck-It Ralph is easy to fall in love with, and it is Disney's most emotional story in well over a decade. The movie is an electronic roller coaster of sound, colors and adventure. The company nods to old-school gaming through beeps, occasionally pixelated sprites and purposely oddly animated secondary characters. Through is outstanding use of licensed characters, it is a celebration of gaming in its most varied forms and shapes; and through its brilliant execution, it is a celebration of Disney's return to its former glory, and as far as fully original scripts go, it is Disney's best movie up to this very day.