Wreck-It Ralph (2012) / Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), Duology Review

One Great Film and One Advert

The first Wreck-It Ralph sits near the top of Disney’s modern work. It’s funny, inventive and full of love for video games, and underneath its jokes about arcade characters it has a real heart: a story about two outcasts who are told what they are by everyone around them and decide to prove them wrong. It’s a 9, and it’s a film I’m always happy to watch again.

The sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, came six years later and sent Ralph and Vanellope into the internet. It has some good ideas and one brilliant sequence, and it spends far too much of its time showing off brand names and websites, like a very expensive commercial. This page looks at both, and at why one works so much better than the other.

I adore the first film. Ralph at Bad-Anon, Vanellope flickering across a candy racetrack, that Mentos-and-cola climax: it’s Disney at its funniest and warmest, and the 9 comes easy. The sequel gets a 6 from me because too much of it feels like a sales pitch, and that’s hard to forgive when the first film loved its world so much.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012). 9/10

Rich Moore directed the first film, and it came out in November 2012. Ralph is the villain in an old arcade game called Fix-It Felix Jr., in which he smashes an apartment building and the hero, Felix, fixes it with a magic hammer and wins a medal. At night, when the arcade closes, the game characters live their own lives, and after thirty years of being the bad guy, Ralph is tired of being hated.

He goes to a support group for video game villains, Bad-Anon, where Bowser, Dr. Robotnik, Zangief and a ghost from Pac-Man sit in a circle and recite an affirmation about being bad and being good with it. It’s a very funny scene, full of cameos from real games, and it sets up Ralph’s problem: he doesn’t want to be bad anymore. He wants a medal of his own.

He sneaks into another game to win one, and his trip takes him through the arcade and into a candy-colored racing game called Sugar Rush, where he meets Vanellope von Schweetz, a glitch who’s been banned from racing, and who is just as much of an outcast as he is.

Game Central Station

The film’s best idea is its world. The arcade’s games are connected through their power cables to a surge protector that works like a train station, Game Central Station, where characters from different games travel, meet and pass through security. Characters who die outside their own games don’t regenerate. That gives the adventure real stakes.

The film is full of details that reward gamers: characters from Street Fighter, Sonic, Pac-Man and Q*bert, jokes about glitches, cheat codes and hidden levels, and a lovingly designed eight-bit world for Fix-It Felix Jr., where the characters move in jerky, pixelated steps. It works for people who have never played a video game, and it works even better for people who have.

Each game world has its own visual style.

Hero’s Duty is a grim first-person shooter full of armored soldiers and bugs. Sugar Rush is a pink and pastel candy land. Fix-It Felix Jr. is simple and blocky. The film moves between them with real invention, and it looks gorgeous. Disney has rarely built a more visually delightful world than Sugar Rush, with its racetracks of frosting and its cake-and-candy scenery.

Ralph and Vanellope

John C. Reilly voices Ralph, and he’s perfect: big, clumsy, sad and warm, a man who has been told he’s a bad guy for so long that he’s started to believe it. Reilly recorded many of his scenes with Sarah Silverman, who voices Vanellope, and their chemistry is the film’s heart.

Vanellope is a glitch, a character who flickers and jumps because of a bug in her code, and the other racers in Sugar Rush have banned her from racing and bully her constantly. She’s sarcastic, rude, funny and desperate to race, and Silverman gives her a scratchy, cheeky energy that makes her one of Disney’s best heroines. She and Ralph start as enemies and become best friends, two outcasts who see in each other what nobody else does.

Their relationship is the reason the film works, and it’s a friendship with no romance anywhere near it. I find it more touching than most love stories in modern animation: a big, clumsy man and a little girl who both need someone to tell them they’re worth something. By the end they’ve told each other, and I’d put that payoff up against anything Disney made that decade.

Felix and Calhoun

Jack McBrayer voices Fix-It Felix, the hero of Ralph’s game, a relentlessly cheerful, polite and nice man who has never had to think about how Ralph feels. When Ralph goes missing, Felix sets out to find him, teamed up with Sergeant Calhoun from Hero’s Duty, voiced by Jane Lynch, a tough, battle-hardened soldier with a tragic backstory.

Their subplot is a very funny romance between the nicest man in the arcade and the toughest woman, and it gives the film a second comic thread. Lynch is superb as Calhoun, barking orders in a gravelly voice, and McBrayer’s sweet, blushing Felix is her perfect opposite.

Felix also has his own small arc. He’s spent thirty years getting medals for fixing what Ralph breaks, and it has never occurred to him to wonder how that feels from the other side. By the end, he understands Ralph a little better, and the apartment building in their game finally makes room for the man who wrecks it.

King Candy

Alan Tudyk voices King Candy, the ruler of Sugar Rush, a lisping, giggling, candy-covered monarch who seems silly and turns out to be something much more sinister. He’s the reason Vanellope is a glitch, and his true identity, revealed late in the film, is one of Disney’s best twists, and it recontextualizes everything about Sugar Rush.

Tudyk’s voice, a wheedling impression of the old comedian Ed Wynn, makes King Candy funny and creepy at the same time. The reveal of who he really is, and what he did to Sugar Rush, gives the film a real villain and raises the stakes for the finale.

It’s a twist that works on a second viewing too. Once you know who King Candy really is, his early scenes are full of small clues, from his interest in Ralph’s medal to his fear of Vanellope ever crossing the finish line. The film plays fair with its audience, and the reveal feels earned.

The Ending

The climax has Ralph realizing he can save Vanellope and the whole arcade by doing what he was built to do: wreck things. He has to smash a huge soda bottle mountain in Sugar Rush, filled with Diet Cola and Mentos, to create an eruption that will destroy the invading Cy-Bugs, and it means sacrificing himself.

That’s a beautiful payoff. The film has spent ninety minutes telling Ralph he’s more than a bad guy, and in the end his bad-guy skills are exactly what save everyone. He can stay exactly who he is and learn that who he is can be good.

Vanellope gets her race and her identity back, and Ralph goes home happy at last to be the villain, because he knows he matters to someone. That last beat gets me, and I think it’s the best ending Disney animation managed in those years.

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). 6/10

Rich Moore and Phil Johnston directed the sequel, and it came out in November 2018. The steering wheel on Sugar Rush breaks, the game will be scrapped, and Ralph and Vanellope go into the internet, newly connected to the arcade’s wifi, to buy a replacement on eBay. There, Vanellope falls in love with a dangerous online racing game called Slaughter Race and a new life, and Ralph can’t bear the thought of losing her.

This is a good idea for a sequel, and its central theme is mature: a friendship in which one person grows and the other is afraid of being left behind. Ralph’s insecurity becomes the villain, literally, when a virus copies his neediness and creates an army of clingy Ralph clones that threaten the internet.

It’s a clever, adult idea for a children’s film, and it gives the ending some real feeling. The problem is everything around it: a tour of real websites and brands that fills much of the running time and pushes the story into the background.

The Internet as Product Placement

Much of the sequel is spent touring the internet, shown as an enormous city full of real brands: Google, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more, all shown as gleaming buildings and friendly characters. The film makes jokes about pop-up ads, viral videos, comment sections and clickbait, and many of them are funny.

It also feels like a two-hour advertisement for the brands it shows, and for Disney itself. The internet here is shiny, exciting and mostly harmless, with its dangers pushed into a few dark corners. I don’t want to spend an hour admiring eBay’s architecture, and every glowing logo reminds me that somebody signed a deal. The first film’s arcade felt like a loving tribute to a world. The sequel’s internet feels like a shopping mall.

The Disney Princess Sequence

The sequel’s best sequence takes place on Oh My Disney, a Disney fan site, where Vanellope wanders into a dressing room full of Disney princesses, from Snow White to Moana, voiced by most of their original actresses. They question whether she’s a princess, and when she says she has never needed a man to save her and has been poisoned, cursed and misunderstood, they declare her one of them.

The scene is very funny and self-mocking, full of jokes about princess clichés, and it’s the best thing in the film. The princesses then change into comfortable clothes, and later they return to save Ralph in the finale, using their individual skills. It’s the one sequence in the sequel with the wit and warmth of the original, and it proves Disney can laugh at itself.

It’s also, of course, another piece of brand promotion, since every princess belongs to the studio that made the film. The difference is that this time the joke is on Disney, and the sequence is so funny and affectionate that it gets away with it.

Vanellope Grows Up

The sequel’s ending is brave. Vanellope decides to stay in Slaughter Race, a new game with a new friend, the cool, tough racer Shank, voiced by Gal Gadot, and Ralph has to let her go. They remain friends, talking through the internet, but their lives go in different directions.

This is an unusual ending for a Disney film, a story about a friendship changing shape and surviving it, and it’s the truest thing in the sequel.

I respect Disney for letting Vanellope go. The first film is about Ralph learning to accept himself, and the second is about Ralph learning to let someone he loves be who she needs to be. That arc is worth the trip, and it’s the main reason the sequel reaches a 6 despite the logos.

Craft Note

Is Ralph Breaks the Internet as good as Wreck-It Ralph?

The original gets a 9 from me without a second thought: funny, inventive, moving, and built on a friendship I believe in completely.

The sequel is a 6. It has a brave ending and a princess scene I’d happily watch on its own, and too much of the rest plays like an advert for the internet. That’s a bigger letdown than it should be, because the first film showed how much better this team could do. Watch the first. Watch the second if you want to know what happens next.

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