FILMS based on video games have, by and large, not been great successes on the big screen. On the other hand Wreck-It Ralph, an animated film about video game characters, has given the Disney studio one of its biggest hits.

What Toy Story did for children’s playthings, Wreck-It Ralph does for video games. It takes a whole arcade of video game characters and makes them human.

Wreck-It Ralph is the bad guy in a game called Fix-It Felix, one of the older games on offer. Ralph (voiced by John C Reilly) is in therapy because he’s fed up with being the villain and looked down on by Felix (Jack McBrayer) and other residents of the computerised world. He wants to be a hero and save the day for a change instead of destroying everything around him.

So, under cover of darkness, he sneaks out of Wreck-It Ralph and enters another arcade game, a futuristic shout-up called Hero’s Duty, where tough space trooper Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch, making her Glee character Sue Sylvester look like a pussycat) puts him through his gaming paces.

He escapes into the neighbouring game, the sickly sweet Sugar Race racing game, accidentally taking with him an alien Cy-Bug that sets about destroying King Candy’s sugary kingdom.

Ralph teams up with outsider and would-be race champion Vanellope von Schwetz (Sarah Silverman) to beat off an invasion by castoffs from Starship Troopers. All this is delivered in eye-popping (or headache-inducing) 3D with non-stop shoot-outs, car races, alien invasions and Ralph’s old-fashioned demolition man.