Disclosure: This is not a compensated or sponsored post. I was invited to an advance screening of the movie. All opinions expressed here are my own.
Last week, I was treated to a special screening of “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” the sequel to 2012’s hit videogame-themed comedy “Wreck-It Ralph.” And let me tell you, it looks wonderful.
The basic gist of the sequel is this: There’s trouble at Litwak’s Arcade. Sugar Rush, the kart racing game that counts Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) as one of its racers, has a broken steering wheel. This leads Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the videogame ogre with a hart of gold, to launch a mission to get a new steering wheel; otherwise, the game will be unplugged and Vanellope, his best friend, will disappear.
And where do they head to find that steering wheel? That’s right: the Internet.
Far from the way that the internet has normally been visualized. One of the scenes we saw had Vanellope bidding on a velvet cat painting on eBay, which, in the movie, looks like a typical auction house.
Another scene, which serves as something of the emotional fulcrum for the movie, saw Ralph — after rising in popularity as an instantly meme-able personality — reading negative comments about himself, his large heart breaking.
And, of course, there was the princess sequence, which has been screened at D23 and teased in recent promotional materials, wherein Vanellope comes face-to-face with all of the classic Disney princesses (everyone from Snow White to Moana). It’s still a hoot and as the production works to complete the sequence, has become even more visually stunning and comically precise.
After some amusing late-night interactions between the video game characters at Litwak’s Arcade, the ensemble gathers to examine the latest addition to the already overloaded surge protector: a Wi-Fi router that looms as menacingly as Buzz Lightyear did to a roomful of outdated playthings in “Toy Story.” Just as the new device arrives, a malfunction to the “Sugar Rush” game forces Vanellope and her fellow racers to flee, prompting the quest that will send the glitchy princess — who flickers whenever she’s feeling insecure — and her temperamental bestie out in search of a replacement part before Litwak (Ed O’Neill) pulls the plug.
Besides, the object here is to playfully riff on the way people use the internet, contrasting all that these sites have to offer — from online auctions to auto-complete search engines with the frustration of figuring out how everything works in the absence of an experienced adult.
For parents that worry about their children using the Internet, a word of mild caution, reinforcing the importance of understanding the sites one visits: Social-media commenters are depicted as potentially toxic, and eBay can be dangerous. In their naiveté, Ralph and Vanellope accidentally wind up bidding $27,001, making one nostalgic for the day when the worst a child could do was run up a phone bill calling 1-900 hotlines to listen to recordings of Hulk Hogan or the Backstreet Boys. Woefully ill-prepared for the internet, the two old-school arcade characters come across as a couple of country bumpkins overwhelmed by the big city.By this point, Vanellope has already been nursing doubts about her place in the universe, questioning whether there could be more to life than doing endless laps around the same tracks. On the internet, she discovers “Slaughter Race,” a more grown-up, “Grand Theft Auto”-style driving game where she’s finally able to pit her daredevil driving skills against someone as well-matched to her tricks: That would be Shank (Gal Gadot), a strong female role model who does wonders for her self-confidence. It’s a crime-infested hellhole, but to Vanellope, it’s paradise, inspiring her hilariously unconventional “I want” song, and one of the movie’s standout sequences, “A Place Called Slaughter Race.”
Whenever a CG character suffers an existential crisis of this magnitude, the creators are cribbing from the Pixar playbook. Even though this movie was made by the folks at Disney (John Lasseter gets a credit but was on leave for the final year of production), it adheres far closer to the feel-good formula of its NorCal cousins. In this case, that’s an asset, considering how much of the original film’s renegade spirit remains — as in the openly satirical approach the sequel takes toward so many other Disney brands, the princesses in particular.
While Ralph discovers how easily a reformed meanie can become a meme, Vanellope ventures over to the “Oh My Disney” virtual world, where she spots several “Star Wars” characters and the obligatory (newly poignant) Stan Lee cameo. There, living happily ever after in a posh lounge, she stumbles on Disney royalty, now idle celebrities: Anna and Elsa, Ariel, Aurora, Belle, Cinderella, Jasmine, Moana, Mulan, Pocahontas, Snow White, and Tiana — all but the eldest voiced by the original performers (Ribon subs for Snow White). Even Kelly Macdonald, who embodied “Brave” for “the other studio,” drops in, earning laughs by making Merida’s Scottish brogue all but unintelligible.
When fickle audiences lose interest, Ralph gets desperate, venturing into the dark net for a shortcut that will exploit his insecurities and, you guessed it, break the internet. Things could have spiraled out of control in this last act, as a swarm of tiny Ralphs (who was loosely modeled after Donkey Kong in the first place) combine to form a massive King Kong-like mega-monster. In this virtual city, of course Google owns the equivalent of the Empire State Building, making it the logical place to stage the final showdown. Luckily, the jokes keep coming even as the film takes this potentially intense turn, giving all those princesses a chance to flip the script on their traditional gender roles.
Trace Disney animated features back to their roots, as many an academic has, and one can find plenty of sexist and racist problems, though the studio has taken a proactive role in trying to correct that over the past decade or so, culminating in 2016’s brilliant can’t-we-all-just-get-along parable “Zootopia.” Ralph is a disruptor by design, and in many ways, he’s the ideal character to bring about the next seismic shift, creating a space where the studio can poke fun at itself while presenting a more enlightened narrative for fans. The movie isn’t all laughs, however, managing to surprise at times by how nuanced the animation can be. Who would have thought that while breaking the internet, Ralph might be breaking our hearts as well?
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