Every animated child's movie has some sort of moral to the story. Generally they are predictable and revolve around the basic things that we teach our kids about good guys always winning and bad guy always losing in the end. But "Wreck-It Ralph" has more.
"Wreck-It Ralph" is the story of an arcade video game character. He is the bad guy who wrecks everything in sight so that "Fix it Felix," the hero and namesake of the game, can fix it. The game ends with Felix always getting a medal for his good deeds. It takes us behind the scenes, when the arcade closes, and the characters "come to life" and socialize with other arcade game characters before getting back to the roles that they have to play the next morning when the arcade opens. But even though they are not "on stage" for the gamers, the characters still distain Ralph and love Felix.
Ralph wants to be loved as well, and realizes that the only way for him to be loved like a hero is to have a medal for heroism. He leaves his video game and sets out to earn one by traveling through the electric cables to another game. When the arcade opens the next morning Ralph isn't there to wreck things -- meaning that Felix has nothing to fix and the townspeople and Felix go into a panic, running around everywhere looking for Ralph. This causes the arcade owner to mark the game out of order.
Here is where the movie takes a unique twist. Ralph is a good person -- who has been programmed to act in a certain manner. The characters dislike him for the role he plays, but they now come to realize that without his wrecking, there would be no need for fixing, and if there were no one to help fix the town, then there would be no hero, no need to rise above anything and more importantly -- no game!
This is a difficult concept for humans to accept. We can't understand why God's order contains struggle. Why can't there just be good? And yet we create the same. We write books and movies and video games with good and bad guys. We even create heroic tales of man against nature, monsters, spirits and more.
The deeper truth is that we have programmed ourselves to think just like the characters in this story. We all wreck things. We wreck our health, our environment, our relationships, our world and more -- and we look for heroes to come and help us, even to save us. We look to political leaders, or church leaders. We look toward sports heroes, actors, men and women of business and finance. We look for people outside to fix things and someone or something that we can blame as the "wrecker." We do this because we have this underlying belief that we are powerless.
All of us have our days when we are Ralph, wrecking everything we touch and then making it worse when we get mad at ourselves, or jealous of the positive attention that others are getting. Sometimes we have days when we are Felix, able to fix any problem and leave the world a better place then before. But most days we are like the town's people, watching everything fall apart around us, feeling powerless and looking for a hero to fix it all. Which begs the question: Why don't we just fix it ourselves?
And the movie gives the answer. There is a powerful spiritual analogy here and it revolves around the story line of the heroine Vanellope. She is presented to us as a computer glitch -- a broken character that feels that she is programmed to be a winning car racer but who has been told that she can not even compete. We come to later learn that the program to her memory and everyone else's memory had been deleted -- but will re-set if she can overcome the odds and win the big race.
The same concept is explained by the angel Margaret in my soon to be released Hay House book "Messages from Margaret." She explains that our human experiences are exactly this way. We have forgotten the greatness of our spirit self, our true being and we have settled into the roles and stories that we were born into. We have forgotten that we were all programmed with the same limitless essence as the Creator -- to be a co-creator and to love, succeed and be happy. But our memory does not recall who we really are, so we see our life only as the role we currently play. We believe, like the game characters, that we are pre-programmed to live at the whim of the being behind the joystick, who allows the bad guys to destroy and the good guys to fix, in a never ending cycle. Instead, Margaret offers us messages of hope and empowerment -- the same message that comes forth in "Wreck-It Ralph."
Both the book and this movie give us hope about life. They teach us not to judge other people, because we are all a part of a much bigger story that we have all come here to experience. They teach us that sometimes we are the good guy, sometimes we are the bad guy and sometimes we are townspeople waiting for a leader. But each time one of us steps out of our "pre-programmed" role and acts in a heroic manner -- a manner that allows who we truly are to shine through -- then this entire game called life, gets re-set. Then we remember a little more about who we all truly are, and the ripple effect is felt around the universe, and out of the wreckage a new world is born.
For more information on Gerry and Margaret please visit www.gerrygavin.com.