Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

(In French, Netflix Streaming, August 2019) One of the joys of being a free-range film critic (Wild! Carefree! Untamed!) is bouncing between all eras of film history, unbeholden to any specific genre, commercial imperative, venue specialization or upcoming deadline. One of the better consequences of such an all-inclusive perspective is thinking perhaps a bit too much about how contemporary releases are going to age. What, of the thousands of movies released in 2018, will still be watched in 10, 25, 50, 100 years from now? What distinguishes an enduring film from one that fades away? It’s largely an academic discussion—studios make movies for their weekly box-office results and quarterly reports, not posterity (although an enduring film does mean financial returns for a longer period). Still, there are circumstances where posterity becomes an interesting question, and you can point at the Disney Animation Studio films as one case where it matters most. There are, after all, Disney fans, specialists and historians with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fifty-plus movies produced by that studio. By being part of that lineage, they endure even as comparable films have sunk back obscurity. Then there’s the ultra-timely nature of Ralph Breaks the Internet to deal with—explicitly trying itself to technological innovations (and a current-day expression) in its very title, the film courts such discussions. That it’s a rare theatrical sequel to a previous title in the Disney pantheon also raises its own questions. Ultimately, we don’t know and won’t know how well it will endure—maybe Facebook will go bankrupt tomorrow, maybe computing will change radically over the next few years, maybe a global EMP event will reduce the Internet to inert electronics for a few decades. And trying to assess a film independently of its context requires a detachment of steel. (I mean—the Disney Princesses scene is fun and all, but how will it sound in a decade?) What can be evaluated, roughly, is how solid the film is—and on that aspect, the film is dramatically sound: the character relationships take centre stage, with the Internet providing a backdrop through which to explore timely yet enduring issues of how people interact. It’s also easy to forget that enduring films don’t always depend on timeless universality—sometimes, a perceptive period piece can be just as interesting to watch, and that’s probably how Ralph Breaks the Internet has the best chances of being fondly remembered. This being said—maybe there’s a lesson in how Ralph Breaks the Internet was widely expected to win the Best Animated Feature Film Academy Awards (all the way to some stores pre-printing celebratory material) … and lost to Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. Which one of these two will be best remembered?