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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 11/8/2024

Wreck-It-Ralph: Folie a Deux

A while back, I looked at a case study in modern Hollywood accidentally coming up with a new success and then instantly undermining it in a sequel with The LEGO Movie. Well, companion to that, happening right about the same time at a rival studio, is another case study in such a movement, this time from Disney with its pair of Wreck-It Ralph films.

A brief synopsis: Essentially Toy Story but with video games, the first film tells about the titular Ralph, the bad guy in a classic video game called Fix-It Felix Jr. who, tired of being the bad guy all the time, sets out into other video games to try and be the good guy. He ends up in a candy-themed racing game where he helps the waifish and wayward Venelope Von Schweets to win her rightful place as a real racer and embrace his nature to do good. It's pretty bog-standard anti-hero makes good storytelling, and it's got wit and charm and a solidly good ending. It's about a good-natured guy who learns to use his innate skills to help people and contribute and receive recognition from his peers. It's not great cinema, but it's an entertaining trifle.

The sequel...is not that. The focus turns to Venelope who, now queen of her game, has grown bored with constantly being amazing. She and Ralph go into the Internet to try and win a new wheel for her game that needs replacing, and she decides to abandon everyone for a new place in another racing game that's more dangerous. Also, Ralph is essentially the bad guy because he's clinging to her and wants her to stay.

So, the good guy and main character of the first gets pushed aside for the supporting girl character, she's too awesome and needs to be allowed to grow even more, and he's a baby who's just trying to hold her back because he can't let her go. Do you see how the second film completely and totally undermines the first? Well, with 6 years since the release of the second, there's no official word on a third film, even though the second actually made a bit more money than the first. It's weird.

But let's dig into the issues with the sequel.

Heroes

The development of the first film was actually centered around Fix-It Felix for a very long time. The idea was the Felix would be so tired of winning all the time in his game that he'd "game jump" to try something else. After pursuing this for a while, the writers Phil Johnston and Jennifer Lee, decided that the entire conceit made Felix unlikable. Going from top of his own personal world and not finding it enough? That's not the kind of character you build a film around, especially something that's supposed to be easy and crowd-pleasing like Wreck-It Ralph. So, they decided that the underdog was the right place to go, elevating the antagonist of the video game to the protagonist of the movie. Again, it's super standard stuff, but it works in its own little box.

So...remember the short synopsis of the second film, Ralph Breaks the Internet? Remember how Venelope is now the top of her game, gets bored, and decides that she needs more? Do you notice how it is the exact character arc that they rejected for the first film and Fix-It Felix?

Yeah, I noticed it too.

Venelope is deeply unlikeable in Ralph Breaks the Internet. Never mind that she's played by Sarah Silverman who spends every second of her voice performance in both films at this nasally, high register while hyperventilating through every line of dialogue, which is bad enough. No, it's made all the worse that she's this entitled brat in the second film who has the world but it isn't enough, and she has to actively push away the one person who believed in her and even saved her in the previous film to get that extra bit of fun out of life.

You see, Venelope ends up feeling like a mother looking for a second life after too many years looking after her kid (Ralph is extremely child-like in the second film). She's bored with her comfortable middle-class existence where everything's taken care of for her and she doesn't have to struggle for anything, so she abandons her entire set of responsibilities (including to her original game which, we're told, could be shut down if she doesn't come back) for a life of fun in a completely new place, this online game called Slaughter Race. She's a bad person, and she's the main character of the film.

Well, what about Ralph? It's named after him. Isn't he the main character? Really, he's not, but he remains prominent throughout. The plot is them needing to raise tens of thousands of dollars to pay for a special wheel on eBay (that they needlessly and wildly drove the price up on for no reason) for Venelope's game cabinet that they kind of broke through antics while a real person was playing, so Ralph decides to become an internet sensation, starring in a series of demeaning videos, chasing every trend, to get likes and raise the necessary cash. Ralph is working his butt off to help Venelope, degrading himself even to save her game and make sure her home remains. And...he ends up being the bad guy because he's too clingy to the only friend he has, the girl he saved from a life in the wilds of her game and made her freaking princess of it through his actions.

It's a familiar pattern at this point. The strong male character must become a simpleton and his simple-nature becomes antagonistic to the real hero: the female character. Maybe he's not a bad guy, but he needs to learn to be better. You see, instead of the first film which had an actual antagonist in a character named Turbo, the antagonist is...the title character.

Psychological Realism


Looking back through the history of Disney, there's a common approach to storytelling in their animated films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves through the restoration of the nineties, and that is romantic adventure. The emphasis on princesses from Snow White to Aurora to Cinderella to Ariel to even Esmerelda (Gipsy princess, I guess) did put a heavy emphasis on appealing to girls, but there was always this sense of adventure to things like the ending of Snow White with the dwarves chasing the evil stepmother up in the rain and lightning or Prince Phillip fighting Maleficent in dragon form in Sleeping Beauty. These were adventures in strange lands with romance and a fight between good and evil. They weren't Chekov. They weren't Ibsin. They were musical adventures for children.

That has changed at Disney in recent years. The first Wreck-It Ralph was broadly along those lines, but there was no romance between a prince and princess. It edged more towards buddy comedy, but the adventure aspect with a broadly good vs. evil paradigm was still in place. Ralph Breaks the Internet goes against that with this emphasis on Vanelope's self-actualization and Ralph's dealing with his clinginess. Is this the sort of material for the target audience? I'm also reminded of Encanto, another Disney animated feature film that came out roughly the same time where the central point of the film was that the main character, a girl, wasn't loved enough by her grandmother because she didn't have special powers like the rest of her family. Never mind good or bad in terms of the film's quality (sure, "We Don't Talk about Bruno" is a pretty good song, I'll admit that), but the storytelling focus on not being loved enough and confronting your matriarchal superior about it...doesn't feel like the kind of thing that 5-8 year old girls are going to absorb all that intricately.

The first film felt like it was written by adults for children. The second one feels like it was written by twenty-five year old girls for teenagers. The writing team of the two films aren't the same. The first was written by Johnston and Lee, but the second was written by Johnston and Pamela Ribon (she later went on to write a short film called...My Year of Dicks). I think that might have something to do with the change.

Music and Synergy


The first film has non-diegetic music and nothing else, just the score by Henry Jackman. The second one, though, has a sung song in the tradition of Disney films. Venelope, for plot reasons, ends up wandering the Internet and lands at Disney.com, finding herself in a room with all of the other Disney princesses. There, they tell her that since she herself is a princess, she needs to have a song to tells her what she wants. After more plot, Venelope ends up back in Slaughter Race and does sing her song. It's an ironic piece about how this violent, dank, dark place is her ideal, inverting the whole Disney princess song aesthetic. It's a song designed for adults, the showstopper in a movie for kids. Now, having two kids who have seen the film, I can say that they do laugh through it. They laugh at the random things that happen like a shark popping out of a manhole to eat someone, but the whole point sails over their head. The ironic treatment of the song itself is designed for adults.

So, the first film was filled with video game cameos, but they worked. Why did they work? Because they weren't that important to the actual story. The story itself centered on two games invented by the writers (Fix-It Felix Jr. and Sugar Rush), but we could see characters like Q-bert, Kano from Mortal Kombat, or the ghosts from Pac-Man in scenes. Heck, Kano is prominent in an early scene where we're introduced to Ralph. However, knowing who they are is incidental. It's where that balance between entertaining children and adults gets struck, the bright colors and quick moving of the plot appealing to kids while the "I Know That Guy!" bit applies to adults.

The second film is more...ugh...synergistic with that trip to Disney.com which occupies a solid section of the middle of the film while the princesses get to rescue Ralph in the end (by putting him in Snow White's dress as he falls, of course). It also includes time for stormtroopers from Star Wars and a bit from Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy (don't have to pay anyone for that likeness), and all of this just rubs me the wrong way. The first film's cameos were based on the idea of video games, came from different sources not owned by Disney (ala the cameos in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, also a Disney movie), and were tied to the world created by the film. The cameos in the second all feel like an effort at a corporation keeping its branding fresh. It feels disposable, like all cameos, but it gets so much attention in the later portion of the films that dominate the action while being so brazenly about corporate synergy instead of fun.

Plot and Point


So, I come to the actual plot of the film. I won't recount it, but let me just say that it's a hodgepodge of events. In fact, it almost feels more like a series of television episodes rather than one story. The first film had acts and trips to different parts of the arcade, including a side-adventure into a Call of Duty-like game called Hero's Duty, but it was all centered around Ralph's quest to be a good person despite being a bad guy. The second film is...not nearly as clear.

The film has to start with the assumption that Ralph is the main character, or at least a main character, and then it works to push Venelope to the front. It does that by having them together as best friends in the beginning for the introduction through the beginning of the plot to get the wheel which takes them to eBay on the Internet which they then have to figure out a way to make the money (through following click-bait to farm for items in games...great lesson for the kids), which leads them to Slaughter Race, but it doesn't work for their money purposes, so Ralph tries to become an internet personality which involves Venelope traveling the internet for clicks. All of this gets followed up by a virus infecting Ralph and creating needy copies of him that combine together into a giant Ralph that they must defeat. It's so all over the place without a clear throughline, the throughline that does eventually develop being about how the hero of the first one is actually terrible.

It's so just hard to watch from a storytelling perspective. It's jerky and janky. I don't think it works, which is a marked contrast to the relatively clean storytelling of the first.

In the End

So, it's a familiar pattern. Sudden surprise hit gets reworked in the sequel to undo what the first one did. It's just another case study, and I find it interesting in conjunction with the example of the LEGO franchise that died just as quickly (having a spin-off in between its two main entries). The Wreck It Ralph sequel made a bit more money, but it also cost a bit more money, negating the whole idea of going from one success to a bigger success that has defined the ethos of modern franchise filmmaking since The Empire Strikes Back. There's no news on a sequel at all, and it's been six years since Ralph Breaks the Internet came out, though John C. Reilly, who voiced Ralph, has said that he has great ideas.

Did the unfocused storytelling, unappealing main character, over the head approach to its point for its audience, and its demeaning of the previous film's main character play a part in diminishing potential box office returns? I don't know, but I can say that it did diminish the film artistically.
Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Heretic

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Phantom Light (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It really would have helped the film overall to have greater clarity around its central narrative. So, it's a mix, not quite successful, but pretty consistently interesting." [Library]

The Edge of the World (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's about as long as most of his quota quickies, but it is so much more. It's his first great film." [Library]

The Spy in Black (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Helped in no small part by a strong cast, especially Veidt, The Spy in Black is overall a solid spy adventure that ends so much better than it begins." [Library]

The Thief of Bagdad (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, it's fun. It's thin and nonsensical, but it's fun. It's colorful, has a light tone, and looks good (though those early blue screen effects are rough). Just the sort of thing the world needs as it descends into a war." [The Criterion Channel]

49th Parallel (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's held back by the needs of the Ministry of Information (my skin crawls writing that for real), but Powell and Pressburger did the most within the strictures given." [Library]

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's beautiful, touching, and heartwarming. It's a complete gem of British cinema." [Personal Collection]

A Canterbury Tale (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's really nice. A bit weird. But I think it hides something special that becomes evident once the action actually reaches Canterbury." [The Criterion Channel]

I Know Where I'm Going! (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "This is a nice little story elevated by the talents of everyone involved." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 11/30, and it will be about the directed works of Michael Powell (and Emeric Pressburger).