The official trailer for Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 dropped on Monday. I really loved the teaser trailer. It did a good job of re-introducing the characters and giving a vague overview of the plot. Even though the rabbit and pancake seen got a little old, it still gave me a lot of hope.
When it was announced that the Disney princesses would be making an appearance, I thought it would be interesting. Disney has never really acknowledged whether or not the princesses have ever interacted with each other and I love the Pocket Princesses comic, so I figured it would be a cute cameo.
The official trailer has me believing the exact opposite. The trailer focuses heavily on Ralph and Vanellope visiting the Oh My Disney! website and interacting with all the different franchises Disney owns. They even get to the website by Vanellope asking a search bar to take them to a website that’s “Super intense and really nuts.”
Disney doesn’t need to hawk its products like that. They practically sell themselves. It feels odd. It’s like all the movie is just one big commercial for Disney.
While it does tease a possible chase between Vanellope and some Storm Troopers, which admittedly would be pretty awesome; the main focus of the trailer is on Vanellope meeting all of the Disney princesses.
The scene is….pretty interesting. The characters act less like their canon selves and more like the over-exaggerated personalities assigned to them by fans. They even bring up all the tropes and stereotypes associated with Disney princesses. It’s not necessarily bad, but I’ve found that Disney has been relying more and more on this kind of humor, especially in its princess movies. However, it doesn’t always work. This is one of those times.
It gets stale and boring when you make the same kind of jokes over and over again. It’s like Disney doesn’t realize that they can make a princess protagonist go against the sexist tropes without explicitly referencing in the text, as though people are unable realize how “progressive” the movie is if it isn’t said.
Did you forget the most important rule of story telling, nay the most important of movies: SHOW, DON’T TELL. Believe me, the audience, including children, will understand it perfectly.
But the most frustrating part about the trailer is that it goes out of its way to show that it is indeed a Disney movie. Not only does it market its own website, but by displaying actual brand names like Google and Twitter, rather than the parody websites it feels like Disney is saying: “LOOK AT HOW MANY FRANCHISES WE OWN. WE CAN AFFORD TO USE THE ACTUAL NAMES OF COMPANIES IN THE FILM. TAKE THAT EMOJI MOVIE.”
So far, it looks like the whole movie is literally just a giant Disney ad.
While actual video game characters appeared in the first movie, they were relegated to cameo roles and made the movie stand on its own relying on a unique sense of humor and great character dynamics.
This one feels like it’s trying to copy the success of the original and The LEGO Movie without understanding what made those movies great.
But, I’m still going to give this movie a chance. People had the same feelings about the original movie and it isn’t likely Disney is going to make that kind of mistake. It’s very likely that their Disney trip won’t take up much of the story at all.
Disney is pretty good with making sure their trailers don’t spoil the whole movie. We still don’t know who the main villain will be, or how Fix-It Felix and Sergeant Calhoun and the others will play into the story. Besides, there’s plenty of Internet to explore and the stuff that Disney doesn’t own, they can certainly afford to buy for the movie.
I don’t know if it’ll reach the success of the original movie, but at the very least I can rest knowing that it will be a great way to spend Thanksgiving weekend and it’ll be at least 100 times better than The Emoji Movie.
