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w w w.sci fi n ow.co.u kWreck-It Ralph is branching out in our sneak peek at
Ralph Breaks The Internetgoing viral
When the trailer for Ralph
Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph
2 landed, it came close to actually
breaking the internet, thanks
to a scene featuring 12 Disney
princesses. Suddenly it became
one of the most eagerly anticipated
movies of the year. We’ve now
seen exclusive footage from the
movie including the entirety of that
princess scene and if the trailer got
you excited, you’ll lose your mind
when you see Disney princesses in
sweats and T-shirts.
Producer Clark Spencer was
on hand to talk us through the
footage and tell us what to expect
from the film, as it takes Ralph and
Vanellope on an adventure into
the internet. When Vanellope’s
arcade game breaks, she and Ralph
have to get a replacement part
from eBay in order to save her
game from being scrapped: “But
once she goes into the internet she
discovers this world that she falls
in love with,” Spencer explains,
“and we have to see that friendship
[between Ralph and Vanellope]
go through that moment in time
where two people might have
to actually separate and live in
different places, and that got us
very excited.” He likens it to when
parents “have to say goodbye to
[their] children when they go off to
college” or when childhood friends
separate “because [they’re] going
to different schools, or because
families are moving.”
When Ralph discovers that you
actually need money to buy stuff
on eBay, he turns his hand to
making viral videos on BuzzTube,
which led to one of the film’s
biggest challenges: how do you
make sure that a film about theWords abigail chandlerinternet isn’t dated before it even
gets released? “It was a big battle,”
Spencer admits, “every single day
something new is happening on
the internet, and when it came to
the concept of figuring out what
kind of viral videos Ralph was
going to be making, how do we
make those videos something
that in five or ten years people
are either going to recognise or
potentially still be making?”
The trick, they learnt, was to
try not to be too relevant. “We
tried our hardest not to reference
anything specific to what might be
happening at this moment in time
and think about it more generally.”
Luckily, some things are timeless- like Disney princesses. Not only
do the princesses appear in the
movie, but the original voice actors
are all back too (with the exception
of the actors for the much older
characters, of course). “We got all
the original voices back to do the
princesses and it was probably one
of the most amazing parts of my
career, weirdly,” Spencer says.
The actors were all more than
willing to return to their roles, and
brought an insight with them that
the animators, writers and directors
didn’t have. “After they did the
recording session we would have
them meet with the animation team
to talk about their character because
a lot of these animators had never
worked with these specific princess
characters. And when they talked
about what it meant to them, being
this voice, it was emotional to hear
that even 20, 30 years later, for them
it was a defining moment in their
life and they still felt connected to
that character and deeply cared
about them.”
While the returning voice
actors lent a continuity to the
princesses, the visual look of them
has changed dramatically. Spencer
stresses that they aren’t the ‘real’
princesses, they’re their online
avatars in the website Oh My
Disney, which means they all had
to fit the Wreck-It Ralph style of
animation. “We all know them as
hand-drawn characters that have
never really lived in the world of
CG,” Spencer says of characters
like Ariel and Snow White, “and
that was the key element, figuring008 |The disney princesses
scene will slay.