You know, I’ll be brutally honest here… There are days where I question my love for Disney.
Now don’t be alarmed, I’ll always love Walt Disney’s work – from the majority of his animated features to his television show to his best live-action movies to Disneyland itself – and it’ll always be a pivotal part of my life and a big influence on my own work. When I say Disney, I mean the whole thing. The company, the empire, the franchise of franchises, the brand of brands, everything.
I don’t know why I question it, because there are plenty of things about Disney that I don’t approve of. I am confident that I’m not some mindless consumer, not some shill for the mouse… I find myself loving the films and TV shows that they make, and what they do with the theme parks. I even buy merchandise based on those things that I really like. At the same time, I vocally decry some of their business practices, things that I perceive to be trip-ups, I avoid certain things they put out (their remakes of the animated features, for starters), and other little things. Yet here I am, every day of my life, excited at most of the things that they announce, always wondering what they’re up to…
Seeing the latest Walt Disney Animation Studios feature, Ralph Breaks The Internet, reminded me that it’s fine to love a majority of the films that the company commissions and puts out. After all, these are movies made by hard-working folks. They put their all and passion into these films. My love for Disney Animation stems from their legacy and all the great films that they’ve made. I’m always optimistic when it comes to their work, especially since we’re far past the troubled days of the early aughts. For a long while now, Disney’s feature animation wing has been making good films, some of them suggest a newer, bolder, more diverse WDAS. One that, I feel, could align with Walt’s early animated output. I think it’s also quite telling that I was struck by their latest film, Ralph Breaks The Internet, a pleasant and often clever little sequel to their 2012 video game adventure Wreck-It Ralph that happened to have – to these eyes and ears – a good chunk of narrative issues.
I was particularly struck by Wreck-It Ralph’s arc in the film. This could’ve been some fun toss-away diversion, but no, something in the film smacked me, and it took some time for it to come barreling at me like a train. Yes, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ latest still managed to effect me, warts and all. There’s a reason I love that studio, through thick and thin.
And please, do not read on if you have not seen Ralph Breaks The Internet. Or the first Wreck-It Ralph for that matter. There will be MAJOR SPOILERS ahead…
Let’s go back to the first movie… Ralph comes from an early 1980s video game called Fix-It Felix, Jr. A fun little riffing on arcade classics like Donkey Kong and Rampage, Ralph only knew one world for thirty years. Thirty years! This world was rather lonely and frustrating. He does his job every day, yet his game comrades treat him like dirt, not dissimilar to how some may view blue-collar workers or how some may act ungrateful towards people who don’t have college degrees or specialize in anything considered “meaningful”. Some jobs have to be done, some are dirty, some are tough.
Ralph never really wanted to cause harm to the Nicelanders, he’s simply programmed to be the enemy of them in the game. The Nicelanders were simply jerks to him, all because of what he’s programmed to do. It’s just his job, and it’s their job to be pieces of a game, they’re meant to be terrorized by Ralph! Since he’s a major part of the game, he deserved better than a brick heap and the cold shoulder. The Nicelanders may get hurt, but they’re fine after daily gameplay wraps up. No one dies in their own game, they likely bruise up like cartoon characters normally do. Wreck-It Ralph can very well be interpreted as a film about how one can find satisfaction with the position they’re in, but I see it more as a subtle commentary on how we take certain people in certain job positions for granted.
So when Ralph goes to another game in an attempt to achieve something great and be seen as who he truly is, he ends up in Sugar Rush and becomes best friends with the ostracized Vanellope von Schweetz. In Ralph’s case, the people in his world needed to be nicer to him. Vanellope’s game-mates were programmed to hate her by a power-hungry egotist. That’s how they bonded, and in the end, Vanellope got her game restored and the people of Ralph’s world became nicer towards him. As a result, Ralph’s friendship with Vanellope is near-unbreakable, but to a fault. Ralph shows throughout that he’s dependent on her.
This of course spirals out of control, and leads to an expectedly emotional third act where his issues come to a head. Ralph becomes desperate, doing everything he can to keep Vanellope away from what he views as harmful to her. He becomes overprotective and almost parental towards her, and goes to rather extreme lengths to keep her by his side… Releasing a virus into the high-octane racing game (Slaughter Race) that she wants to live in for the rest of her existence. This nearly gets her killed, jeopardizes Slaughter Race, and then later poses a threat to the entire Internet. Forget accidentally taking a Cy-Bug to Sugar Rush in the first film, this was a major mess-up. The virus that Ralph unleashes feeds off of any insecurity or “mistake,” and goes from there. The virus latches onto Ralph’s clinginess and exploits it, creating a ton of zombified Ralphs who are all after Vanellope, forming a monstrous giant version of the wrecker.
I initially walked out of that theater thinking that Ralph was an outright jerk in many sequences in the film, particularly during that final half hour. I was actually really frustrated… But after the movie was over, I thought about it for a minute…
Young me was like Ralph…
Not entirely like young me, but my path as a teenager was not dissimilar to his journey.
As a kid, I wasn’t quite the best social animal. I had friends, I got along with people who attended the elementary school I went to. I am on the spectrum, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was very little. Elementary school was almost like a utopia for me, someone who wasn’t going to navigate the world like everyone else was. I fully understand, however, that a lot of people didn’t have ideal elementary school years… I consider myself very lucky to have had an inclusive class, good teachers, and a friendly atmosphere that I felt welcome in most of the time. The majority of elementary school was a near-perfect time for me.
That all changed when I was plunged into middle school. The innocent world I knew was blown right open. A lot of middle school was a battlefield, one that took a toll on me. I didn’t adapt and mature the way my peers did, so I went my own direction, sometimes it was rocky and problematic, but I was able to make it through. Middle school threw me up against many things. I met tons of new people, lost some friends, made new ones, made lots of enemies, had trouble faring well in social situations, was constantly jabbed by people who didn’t know me well. Early on, I flat out refused to grow. At other times, I didn’t handle situations the way I would’ve wanted to now. Yet middle school was half-good, because I had some friends, I focused on the good in my life, and didn’t really let bullying or dissenting voices really derail me. I maybe had a night or two where I questioned why it all happened to me, but little beyond that. I was too happy and too passionate about other things to be deterred by what went down those years…
That all changed once again as I left middle school. I was weathered from roughly three years of hell. Some bad happenings at the end of eighth grade and some equally bad experiences during the ensuing summer/fall (first time going on message boards, which went horrifically awry) turned me into a highly insecure person. I was slipping, my grades were bad, I was super-defensive, I didn’t treat myself right, I didn’t listen to what my family told me… It only got worse. I fell into a depression when I entered sophomore year, I partially gave up my ambitions, and despised myself, an incredibly extreme reaction to the fact that there were some majors flaws about myself that I needed to fix. I was a ball of issues prior to high school, but instead of looking at myself and seeing how I could improve myself, I acted like a child. How was this any different from a kid going “Me bad person! Never good!” and resorting to relentless self-punishing?
At the same time, I can’t entirely fault myself for reacting this way. I was being forced into a world where what I was accustomed to wouldn’t always be conducive. There were many things about old me that would not gel, and I needed more in me in order to navigate such a tough world. Little autistic me was rather sheltered, and a lot of that was my own doing. My refusal to adapt to the world around me and a rather unhealthy obsession with nostalgia was a serious problem, and I feel it all ballooned halfway through high school… Once it popped, I had a completely different outlook on life that I feel has served me well for the last ten years. I am able to use nostalgia in small doses (for starters, I don’t let it cloud my judgment of a work of media), I’m not dependent on a seemingly-perfect past, I embrace the new and await its challenges… Ten years passed, I got honors, I graduated high school without staying back, I made it through college, improved my own work, and I am very goal-oriented. These experiences helped me a lot in my life…
Similarly, Ralph’s sheltered, simplistic worldview is shook when he’s plunged into the Internet. He goes about things naively, a total fish out of water. He’s unaware of the Internet’s bad sides, he scoffs at the destructive world of Slaughter Race, he is an *ahem* wreck without Vanellope. Ralph’s life is some colorful games around an enclosed arcade, friends, simple pleasures like drinking root beer at Root Beer Tapper‘s or engaging in fun little activities. When it all goes south, his reactions were very extreme, like a kid who got thrown into the adult world. His reactions were so extreme that he truly broke the Internet, and nearly got his best friend offed. Wreck-It Ralph became very self-destructive and desperate, all in what looked like a silly little movie about Internet jokes and Disney synergy. After learning to let go and accept that Vanellope will live in Slaughter Race, Ralph improves himself and gets through life without always seeing Vanellope in person. It makes for a truly bittersweet ending that rarely happens in Disney animated features. All my grumblings with this film aside, I admire that a modern animated movie even went this far… It and Zootopia hit me the most out of the recent Disney animated features. It’s no surprise that both had pretty much the same teams behind them. Rich Moore, who of course directed the first Wreck-It Ralph, returned to the chair. Co-directing with him and co-writing the script was Phil Johnston, who was a writer on the first Ralph movie as well. These two men were a big part of Zootopia, Moore served as one of two directors on that picture (the other being the film’s originator, Byron Howard), and Johnston was a writer on it.
Again, this is why I love Disney animated movies. They have the ability to hit me like this, while delighting me in many other ways. Current Disney Animation aims to be meaningful, they try to make each of their new films be about something, even if there are arguably some missed opportunities in some of them. The best thing is that they commit to this. The weighty stuff isn’t tacked on. In some animated features, you can kind of sense the people in the boardroom saying “Well, how do we make this part emotional? How can we get a message in here?” I don’t get that with current Disney animated films, or most Pixar movies for that matter. If something else doesn’t add up, you can still bet that the themes of the movie will resonate and hold everything together. That’s certainly what they did in this movie. I was well aware that the movie was going to deal with bullying and anxiety, thanks to interviews with the crew, but I didn’t think it would go this far. As in, I didn’t think it would illustrate a mirroring of who I was, circa 2006-07. Ralph seeing mean comments about him on the Internet only rammed that in even further.
That’s what a good sequel does. It isn’t just some fun-and-games Ralph and Vanellope have wacky misadventures on the Internet stuff. While its story structure suffers from too much rushing, mostly brought on by a typical ticking time bomb plot device (in the form of a soon-to-be-cancelled payment of a replacement steering wheel for Sugar Rush, I explain why I felt this way in my Letterboxd review) that I felt didn’t need to be there in the first place, everything’s held together by the theme. The rest of the movie is peppered with fun and sometimes irreverent little things, wry pokes at the vapidness of modern Internet culture, and some cool set-pieces.
There were a lot of good animated movies released this year, and a lot of good films, period… Ralph Breaks The Internet may be more in the middle of my list, but it undeniably effected me in a way that none of the other 2018 movies did, from Avengers: Infinity War to Annihilation to A Quiet Place (being autistic, that particular one resonated with me something fierce) to even Incredibles 2. I think that says a lot, especially in a modern world where more animated features get cranked out from every pore. I love that Disney Animation still tells stories like this, and on a consecutive basis. To me, this studio continues to prove that their body of work is worth way more than their company lets on. Again, I think it’s very telling that this fun but scattershot sequel was able to affect me like this more so than any movie I saw this year and many movies I’ve seen recently. Some movies have that power because they mirror our own personal lives, and our pasts. There are movies where you empathize with their characters, and then there are ones like these, where they really, really comment on your life or where you were at one point years ago…
Ralph Breaks The Internet was one of those movies for me…
