Setsuled's Journal: wreck-it ralph

Showing posts with label wreck-it ralph. Show all posts

Saturday, February 05, 2022

What Strange Flowers Take Root on Internet Soil?

The whole internet is jeopardised by a villain from an '80s arcade game in 2018's Ralph Breaks the Internet. A sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, this one explores the relationship between Ralpha and Vanellope, and what a surprisingly strange one it is. By the film's climax, their relationship has taken on such strange dimensions that one wonders if the filmmakers were quite aware of what they were doing. In any case, it's fascinating.

The film picks up some time after the first film and Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) have settled into a comfortable life at the arcade. Every day after the arcade closes, they go to the tavern game for drinks and then indulge in some gaming themselves. So, they're friends. Really, really good friends. Who spend all their time together. A boy and a girl. So . . .

And what are you eating, Ralph?! Or is a gigantic cherry just a gigantic cherry?!

Yeah, I don't think this was intentional. At one point in the film, Ralph awkwardly calls her "Sis" and there's a moment at the end that feels a little bit like a father/daughter thing. Both moments feel artificial, like the filmmakers thought of the possible romantic interpretation for the relationship late in production and introduced some elements to contradict it. But the effort was futile because subtext is still there. And the more I think about it, the more I think it was a product of the writers' subconscious.

Why couldn't they have a romantic relationship? He's older than her but, considering Vanellope's game, Sugar Rush, was developed by a company we're told went out of business long ago, she's definitely lived enough years to be mentally an adult. Is she like Claudia from Interview with the Vampire, an adult trapped in a child's body, or is she kept mentally a child forever? Either one would be pretty sad. But, if we really wanted to, we could avoid thinking about it that way and just picture Ralph and Vanellope as adoptive father and daughter or siblings. Except the movie keeps introducing us to new elements that complicate that.

A lot of it is due to the film's internet setting. Ralph's obsession with keeping Vanellope in his life is directly referred to as "codependent". His scheme to keep her from running off to an MMORPG called Slaughter Race is to infect the game with a virus. When the virus gets out of hand, it creates thousands of dim-witted clones of Ralph, all of whom ruthlessly pursue Vanellope. Yeah, there are sibling relationships like this, but you don't often see them outside of Wagner's operas. The basic creepiness of the clones adds to the impression of dangerous passion--but then the film goes further and the thousands of squirming bodies of Ralphs combine to create a giant Ralph who captures the girl and climbs atop Google Tower like King Kong.

It's like something out of End of Evangelion and it's hard not to think about the fact that Ralph's distinguishing feature is his big fleshy hands. The giant Ralph also has no eyeballs which makes him reminiscent of the pink elephants from Dumbo.

This really is an appropriate story for a movie about the internet, though. What better place to have a strange, ambiguous, tormented relationship than a venue defined by unchecked passion, ambiguous protocols, and insubstantial identity?

The internet jokes throughout the movie are mildly amusing. My favourite was the spam guy, J.P. Spamley, voiced by Bill Hader who, for reasons I can't guess, goes uncredited. I love how he comes off as a down on his luck 1950s door-to-door salesman.

The most heavily promoted aspect of the film, though, is Vanellope's encounter with a group of Disney Princesses, though this is one of the weakest parts of the film.

Mostly they're there to deliver rapid self-parody, but it's so awkward, just as it is in Moana with all of its winks at supposed Disney Princess conventions. It's like a really stoic man was told by his doctor to crack jokes about himself in the interest of cardiovascular health. Every joke feels carefully vetted and shyly researched.

It's interesting seeing how odd the pre-cgi princesses look and realise that the newer characters all have proportionally larger heads, making them all seem more childlike. It's particularly noticeable on Pocahontas, who may have had the most human proportions of all the '90s princesses.

Although I find its weirdness fascinating, I don't think this film is quite as strong as its predecessor. But it was certainly well worth one viewing.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck-It Ralph
Frozen
Big Hero 6
Zootopia

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

To Create, You Must First Wreck

Don't underestimate your eight bit villains. 2012's Wreck-It Ralph represents the beginning of drastic change at Walt Disney Animation Studios in terms of creative vision, most obviously because it was co-written by Jennifer Lee. The woman who would go on to write and direct Frozen, she seems to have brought the first truly vibrant creative voice to the studio since the '90s. Here's an artist with thematic preoccupations, or so one might assume when comparing Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen--both movies are about characters originally designed to be villains who become heroes. But that's not what Wreck-It Ralph's really about and it's not where its greatest strength lies. Wreck-It Ralph works like clock, or even a video game, if you will--it's tightly constructed; story elements are set up subtly but memorably enough before they pay off later in the film. It leads to the single most effective scene in a Disney animated film since Pocahontas.

After Ralph (John C. Reilly) helps Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) learn how to drive her new race car, and thus participate in the race that forms the centrepiece of her game world, he runs into another of the game's characters, King Candy (Alan Tudyk), who very convincingly gives Ralph reasons why he shouldn't help Vanellope. The plausibility of what the King says is so clearly apparent that the following scene, when Ralph has to be cruel to Vanellope, works vastly better than such scenes usually do.

The film is obviously very postmodern, very meta, but it establishes very solid rules for its reality, a shared world of arcade games, and uses those solidly established rules to generate tension as well as heroic pay-offs. We know the hero of Ralph's game, Felix (Jack McBrayer), has a magic hammer that can fix anything, yet it's still surprising and rewarding when he can fix certain things that seem impossibly damaged. But what about this story of a villain leaving his assigned role to become a hero? Is Ralph a Satanic Hero like Elsa? Not really.

Early on, we see Ralph visiting a support group for video game villains. Their mantra is, "Just because I'm the Bad Guy, doesn't mean I'm a bad guy." And indeed, no-one is permanently killed in Ralph's game and even the property he wrecks is always completely fixed. One might wonder if the characters feel the pain of their struggles, like the angels in Paradise Lost who can triumph over each other in battle despite both sides being indestructible. If that's so, then it's Ralph, who's routinely thrown off the top of the building, who gets the worst of it.

He's not really any kind of villain--it's a pantomime and everyone sees it as such.

His game, Fix-It Felix, Jr., looks like a combination of Rampage and Donkey Kong. Rampage truly reorients the villain to the hero position--it features "anti-heroes" by the true definition of the word--the player controls giant monsters who not only destroy buildings but eat people. Donkey Kong features a giant ape who apparently seeks to sexually assault Pauline. Both games would have led to more genuinely sinister characters than what we get in Wreck-It Ralph so we can assume Ralph, as a "villain", was quite deliberately softened, for one reason or another.

Wreck-It Ralph, like Tangled, ultimately endorses conformity, despite superficially being about people who would stray outside their designated places in society. Everyone goes back to their respective games in the end in order to keep the same narratives going for the players (even though characters from two different games marry). Vanellope, at first introduced as a "glitch", a possibly unfinished character whose assets remained in the programme upon release, is ultimately revealed to have a more legitimate right to being in the game than her detractors. The point becomes not, "celebrate the aberrations" but "some apparent aberrations aren't aberrations at all so therefore they're okay". To hammer the point home, the final villain of the story is someone who has succeeded in leaving one game to become a permanent part of another.

But this is still a more solidly written film than Tangled and its characters, particularly Ralph and Vanellope, have a more satisfying and captivating relationship. Felix and a character voiced by Jane Lynch have a romantic subplot that's pretty effective, too.

A student at the junior high school where I work here in Japan told me the movie's Japanese title is Sugar Rush, this being the name of Vanellope's game. It's interesting to think about how a little difference of title completely reframes the story. The film also features a song called "Sugar Rush" by Japanese pop group AKB48:

I'm not an AKB48 fan but I'd say they were certainly the right fit for the material.

Wreck-It Ralph is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.