RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET

WORKING

'''RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET: Wreck-It Ralph 2. Phil Johnson, co-dir. with Rich Moore,''' co-screenplay, with Pamela Ribon. Story by Rich Moore, Phil Johnston, Jim Reardon, Pamela Ribon, Josie Trinidad, with additional material by Kelly Younger. Cory Loftis, production design. USA: Walt Disney Animation Studios, Walt Disney Pictures (production) / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (dist., most of Earth), 2018.

Animation adventure with a strong satiric streak, adequately summarized by "civilian" IMDb user "Lucas Quaresma" Six years after saving the arcade from the Cy-Bugs attack and from Turbo's revenge, the story leaves Litwak's video arcade behind, venturing into the uncharted, expansive and thrilling world of the internet - which may or may not survive Ralph's wrecking. Video game bad guy Ralph and fellow misfit Vanellope von Schweetz must risk it all by traveling to the world wide web in search of a replacement part to save Vanellope's video game, Sugar Rush. In way over their heads, Ralph and Vanellope rely on the citizen of the internet - the netizens - to help navigate their way, including a website entrepreneur named Yesss, who is the head algorithm and the heart and soul of trend-making site "BuzzTube."

Relevant here for an exterior world of obsessive computer users and a world, or worlds, inside arcade games — including such fictional classics as TRON, from TRON (1982) — expanding after a Wondrous Journey by WiFi to the vast cyberspace of the Internet. Note this contemporary cyberspace as spacious, as opposed to images of being trapped in machines in Modern works from the machine age, with the classic image, Charles Chaplin's Charlie trapped in a huge machine in MODERN TIMES.

Look for hexagons and a Descent motif moving the protagonists from the bright, clean (regimented) dystopic world of the legal net into the grungy-dystopic Industrial world of this film's version of the Dark Web. Note also organic looking viruses and an army of virus-generated Ralph clones forming a King Kong. That Ralph/King-Kong threat has a computer-generated icon with psychological issues multiplied by a creepily-organic virus into an "iconic" image of the militantly organic (King Kong) that is both a threat and sympathetic victim. There's also a visual allusion to multiplied miniature Benders in an episode of Futurama, in a DisneyCorp sequel movie that is richly nuanced.

The film is girl-friendly, with a stressed girl/woman/machine interface in having two major characters a girl and woman auto racers, with the woman driving a car crucial for the plot and very cool: powerful and elegant, as a kind of high-speed objective correlative for female empowerment of a positive macha variety.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 30Nov18