Ralph Breaks the Internet: A fun romp with resonant message

Some movies are for romantics, some movies are for brave souls who never get scared, but this new Disney movie is for everyone.

Six years in the making, the sequel to Wreck-it-Ralph is an insightful and heartwarming romp, packed full of clever jokes and colourful, propulsive sequences that’ll please kids and adults alike.

Just how smart it is evident in the scene in which our heroes, Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman), travel through the cables from their offline analog games and into the Wi-Fi router at Litwak’s arcade.

They stand there, a little underwhelmed and ask “is this it?”. And it echoes, their voices bouncing off the empty, voluminous room. Yes, the first step into the internet is a literal echo chamber.

That little droll observation will not be lost on anyone who feels the great possibilities of an open network of endless information and borderless communities has been, more often than not, hijacked by vitriol, trolls and people looking for reinforcement, not different ideas.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Since the events of Wreck-it-Ralph, Ralph and Vanellope have settled into a comfortable pattern — during the day, they’re off to their respective games and when the arcade closes, they hang out and chill with the other game characters.

Vanellope, though, is bored — with only three tracks in her racing game, she’s wondering if there’s more out there than their zeros and ones existence.

When the steering wheel for her game breaks in the real world, Sugar Rush is unplugged. They overhear Mr Litwak saying it costs more to replace the wheel than the game makes all year. The end is nigh for Vanellope and the other Sugar Rush residents, who find themselves homeless refugees in need of sanctuary.

That’s when Ralph and Vanellope decide to use the newly installed Wi-Fi connection in Litwak’s shop to go to the internet and get that steering wheel themselves from eBay.

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The information superhighway

The visual representation of the internet, as envisaged by Ralph Breaks the Internet, is a cornucopia of familiar references — there are logos for Facebook, Amazon, Snapchat and Canva sitting atop massive skyscrapers while pop-ads for “let’s go phishing” and “lose belly fat” follow you around.

The search engine guy, Knowsmore (Alan Tudyk), knows your complete search history and everything about you, and there’s a tortilla wrap with Beyonce’s face on it going for $400 on eBay.

Ralph Breaks the Internet so brilliantly captures all the mania of online culture, your eyes will pop just trying to take everything in. It’s a fun game and it plays on the intimacy between each audience member and their own experiences, forming an immediate bond between you and the movie — because you’re in on the joke.

Ralph and Vanellope “successfully” bids for the steering wheel but now has to find a way to pay for it while the clock counts down, a quest that will see them encountering online games, meme culture and the dark web.

Yessssss’s coat is made up of fibre cables (Disney via AP, File)

The film’s insights into how people interact online, especially when it comes to social media and entertainment, is spot on, though the comments section of BuzzTube is much tamer (it is a kid’s movie, after all) than the level of hate you see in real life.

New characters including bad-arse racer Shank (Gal Gadot), the algorithm queen of BuzzTube Yesssssss (Taraji P. Henson) and pop-up J.P. Spamley (Bill Hader) are all delightful and relatable tropes.

And then there is Vanellope’s side adventure to the Disney online ecosystem, a both cynical and genius cross-promotional move, where she encounters the Disney Princesses and their water-based epiphanies, Storm Troopers, Groot and a Stan Lee cameo.

With a deep vault of beloved Disney intellectual property, Ralph Breaks the Internet can draw on so many characters to populate its world (and sell more merchandise at the same time).

It can also compel the actors who provided the voices of those characters in other films to come back and do a few lines here, including Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear, Idina Menzel as Elsa, Brad Garrett as Eeyore, Vin Diesel as Baby Groot, Mandy Moore as Rapunzel and Ming-Na Wen as Mulan.

That’s the corporate power of Disney.

One of the princesses

If that’s all Ralph Breaks the Internet, directed by Rich Moore and Phil Johnston was, it would be a fun but soulless movie. But what it does is actually tell a nuanced and necessary story about friendship.

Ralph and Vanellope, while besties, aren’t on the same path. Ralph wants everything to stay the same and Vanellope is looking for something new.

How he handles that realisation stirs his needy and selfish impulses, and the last act of the movie is devoted to this exploration of what it means to be a good friend or a bad friend, and it does so without simplifying what can be a messy conflict.

That’s a message that will resonate with everyone in the audience, whether they’re five or 85.

Rating: ★★★★

Ralph Breaks the Internet is in cinemas from Boxing Day.

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