Author: Keith Phipps / Source: Vulture
Disney’s 2012 animated movie Wreck-It Ralph turned the story of a vintage-video-game villain who decides he wants more out of life into a strangely moving story of existential yearning. Six years after getting Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) to the other side of his identity crisis via his unexpected friendship with a chirpy, glitching racer named Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), Ralph’s co-writers Phil Johnston and Rich Moore — now co-directing from a script by Johnston and Pamela Ribon — have returned to the video-game world with Ralph Breaks the Internet, which, as its title promises, brings the protagonists of the first film to the online world.
There, Vanellope becomes enamored with the Grand Theft Auto–like world of Slaughter Race, Ralph becomes a viral sensation on the video platform BuzzTube with some help from an algorithm named Yesss (Taraji P. Henson) — all while visiting such familiar internet destinations like eBay and Oh My Disney (which, in the film, doubles as a kind of home and workplace for many characters under the Disney IP banner).
Recently, Johnston and Moore walked Vulture through how they conceptualized each online element — and why they regret they couldn’t quite find a way to squeeze The Golden Girls into the movie.The Internet
Rich Moore: We talked to a bunch of people that were kind of experts in the internet, and one of the first people that we talked to was Ed Catmull, who was just retiring at our studio as president of Disney Animation. And Ed was really forthcoming about the flaws of the internet, like the infrastructure that it was built on. Ed kept saying if they had known in the beginning that billions of people were going to be using this system that it would have been designed totally different than how it was laid out when it was just three or four universities sharing information. Instead of kind of starting over at a certain point, it just kept building strata after strata of patches and other links to it, and he would describe it as kind of like Rome or Constantinople. It felt like it was this city that had strata of other cities just built on top of it, with the newest kind of being on the very top level.
We thought, “Oh, that’s an interesting metaphor.” So we imagined it as this ball with the original connections at its core, and then on top of it — not really actual strata, but they just kind of built out with these websites that are hovering above the ground.
That they just kept building out on this thing. We imagined it as this sphere that keeps growing, that has the potential to keep growing and growing and growing exponentially, with the surface being all the new stuff. We have that scene when Ralph is looking for the cookie medal when Vanellope throws it over the edge of that building. Down there you see stuff like public chat rooms and Friendster and Netscape Navigator.KnowsMore, the Search Engine
Phil Johnston: An early iteration of KnowsMore was a much bigger character who was going to be traveling with Ralph on an old dial-up express train. He was going to be Ralph’s guide and he was this search engine kind of akin to Ask Jeeves or something …
Moore: A really old one …
Johnston: … that was broken and had a virus and so every fourth answer he gave was wrong, so he kept getting Ralph into these terrible situations because of his wrong answers. But as the story evolved and the core of the story became more about Ralph and Vanellope’s friendship, we just used KnowsMore kind of for information, kind of like a tour guide, someone that has knowledge of everything. It was a great way of getting out exposition, I’ll tell ya that, when you have a character that knows everything.
Moore: His website used to be more than just the little kiosk. It was a huge, collegiate-looking Ivy League hall of academia that was going…
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