Ralph Breaks The Internet

By: Ashlee Dell

First Toys ‘R’ Us, now Sugar Rush. The sequel to the 2012 animated film Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph Breaks the Internet attempts to grab your attention by continuing to use nostalgia combined with the digital age to create its own space and yet still relatable to viewers.

Disney uses their power to take the viewer on a ride. Ralph Breaks the Internet opens six years after Wreck-It Ralph and not much has changed, at least for about ten minutes in. Ralph (John C. Reilly) is still best friends with Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) and they spend just about every minute together at Litwak’s Family Fun Center & Arcade. Ralph even spends time in Vanellope’s racing game, Sugar Rush. They even mess around with the game by altering tracks to make it less boring. However, when a young girl at the arcade is playing Sugar Rush, Ralph’s new course causes Vanellope to crash and leads to the game breaking. Unfortunately, the company that created Sugar Rush has gone out of business and it is more expensive to replace the wheel than to just scrap the game. We blame Amazon.

All of the Sugar Rush characters are now game-less but are taken in by Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch) and Fix-It Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer) until a plan can be figured out. Ralph decides to try and take matters into his own hands to avoid his best friend being deleted. Now that the arcade has WIFI, he and Vanellope attempt to go into the Internet to buy a replacement steering wheel and keep Sugar Rush alive. The Internet is its own world and it is pretty amazing to see the intricacy played out digitally. There are highways determined by connection speed, stores and more. There is even an eBay and BuzzTube, which we’re assuming is a video takeover of BuzzFeed and YouTube. They find the wheel on eBay and, after not knowing how bidding on eBay works, will now have to pay a large sum or lose the wheel if not paid in twenty-four hours.

Through a clickbait pop-up of an immediately identifiable voice, J.P. Spamley (Bill Hader), Ralph and Vanellope decide to try and steal an expensive car from the online game Slaughter Race. Car owner Shank (Gal Gadot) ends up helping them to go viral. BuzzTube’s AdSense rate is just about as bad as YouTube’s – which Ralph soon finds out from the chief of algorithm Yesss (Taraji P. Henson). Ralph works on raising money with more viral videos while Yesss has Vanellope working as a pop-up. Throughout the film, the pair work separately on retrieving the steering wheel to bring the arcade back to normal and find along the way that the digital world is not as they expected. They each struggle with their own identity and friendship while trying to restore the world-wide web.

Along with the animated film being a Disney movie comes the rights to use some of your favorite characters, including all of the Disney princesses as cameos. The voice cast is great, with many reprising their roles from the 2012 film. Ralph Breaks the Internet has some hits and misses in the storyline and the second act turn feels more like a resolution, but the film redeems itself by the end credits.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is in theaters now!

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