It's a testament to Disney's cyclically eternal appeal that they're thought of as the mostly-unquestioned masters of feature animation, even though - from the very beginning of their forays into film - the studio has gone through fallow periods. Only a few years after Snow White, Disney released a financial flop with Fantasia. Their output during much of World War II was relegated to shorts and propaganda films. The studio floundered in the wake of Walt's Death and damn near shuttered their entire animation department for good in the '80s, got mired in direct-to-video garbage in the '90s, and they've apparently abandoned 2D animation in the wake of 2009's The Princess and the Frog.
And yet, they always follow their lean years with a run of highly successful and quality films, and Disney is currently in their longest-running streak of good-to-great animated movies. If there were an obvious choice to buck that trend, the meme-soaked sequel to 2012's Wreck-It Ralph would have been it, but it's not looking like Game Over any time soon.
Following up the original surprisingly touching video game mashup presents one of the most subtlety challenging prospects faced by a studio with a traditionally rocky relationship with sequels. While Pixar managed a near-perfect trilogy in the Toy Story films and this year's Incredibles 2 managed to be joyously refreshing even in today's saturated superhero landscape, the last direct sequel from Disney Animation Studios was 1990's The Rescuers Down Under - which, admit it, you'd probably forgotten about. The original Ralph was about as self-contained as stories get, seemingly using up everything in its conceptual arsenal in favor of four complete character arcs and a richly detailed world. "Where does one go from there?" you may ask.
Well, from the film's marketing, you'd be forgiven for thinking "Uh, they go to the internet! Duh." But no, the answer is a film that spends nearly 2 hours talking directly to the parents of its own target audience about how to handle their children growing up and leaving home.
Six years after becoming best friends, Wreck-It Ralph (of fictional arcade game Fix-It Felix Jr.) and Princess Vanellope (of the racer Sugar Rush) spend their days in Litwak's Arcade as avatars in their respective games and their nights hanging out, swapping stories and jokes, visiting other acrade games, and drinking root beer. Ralph, who'd spent nearly 30 years being ostracized because of his day job as a game antagonist, couldn't be happier, but Vanellope is starting to feel the constraints of predictable routine. When her game ends up broken and she and Ralph must take to the internet to secure a pricy accessory to keep her cabinet running, Vanellope treats the sojourn to cyberspace as a welcome adventure into the unknown, while Ralph is eager to get the errand accomplished as quickly and safely as possible so he can go home and things can go back to normal.
Here is where directors Phil Johnston and Rich Moore lay out the central emotional conflict which neatly threads the needle of driving a potential wedge between the two main characters while avoiding repeating ground that was covered in the original film. Along the way, they run into colorful characters from pop-up adware to search engines to social media algorithms to some very familiar mascots. It's more than enough to become overwhelming, with Vanellope falling in love with an open-world racing game and Ralph becoming a viral video star in a scheme to earn cash for the arcade part forming the backbone of a middle act that is filled absolutely to bursting. One of the best surprises of the first film was how the references were background in a story that had laser-focus on three well-developed locations, and the central concept of the sequel makes that kind of impossible to repeat. The references and sight gags are almost always amusing (with an extended digression at a Disney fan site that's been well-spoiled but still brought down the house), but it is almost enough to over-balance the entire film.
Luckily, where the structure gets messy, the emotional and thematic through-line absolutely soar. There's been hay made of Disney Animation becoming occasionally indistinguishable from Pixar in recent years, and this almost feels like a head-on confrontation with every Sad Dad Stand-In Hero in Pixar's oeuvre. Every paternal cypher who wishes their world would stay trapped in amber, from Woody onward, is distilled into Ralph's emotional resistance to his relationship with Vanellope changing in any way. The film goes out of its way to hammer this point home, setting up a big beat in the final act that feels like a repeat of a similar moment in the first film only to swerve sharply and land a moment that not only plays as a subversion of the usual "Big Busy Action Finale" of so many animated films, but also lands a series of emotional punches that are among the strongest in the studio's recent history.
There's enough "stuff" in Ralph Breaks the Internet that it could be easy to get lost in the weeds, especially in how the film puts the "stuff" at the forefront where its predecessor relegated it largely to side gags or worldbuilding. I rather appreciated minor touches like the potential "coming-out" metaphor related to Gal Gadot's scene-stealing racer Shank, or the way the film slyly argues that metric-chasing cyber-capitalism is ultimately an empty pursuit, and those elements make the sequel's internet gimmick feel more than, well, a gimmick. So, as obnoxious as a couple easy gags might be and as crowded as the narrative gets, going online ultimately feels like the right decision.
I genuinely don't know where the creative team would go if they made a third film, or if we'll be as lucky with Frozen 2 as we were with Ralph 2, but. . . well, being unsure of the future but appreciating the time you have is sort of the point of the proceedings here. So, here's to Disney's longest quality animation streak in history, wherever it happens to go next.
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