

“We had to rebuild everything,” says Matthias Lechner, art director of environments, who spent more than three years at Disney Animation in Burbank working with a team of animators. While the new characters had to be designed from the ground up, re-creating the old familiar faces was in some ways more challenging. “We were like, ‘Who could we get to play this Gal Gadot character?’ Finally, somebody said, ‘What about Gal Gadot?’ “ Also central to the plot is Shank, a racer from a game called Slaughter Race who becomes a big-sister figure to Vanellope. Of course, along with the legacy characters, Vanellope and Ralph encounter a slew of new creations, like an egghead search engine voiced by Alan Tudyk called KnowsMore (“Truman Capote meets Droopy Dog,” is how Johnston describes him) and a trendy sharing-site algorithm named Yesss (voiced by Taraji P. “They were so game to do it,” says Moore.
Sugar rush steering wheel full#
For a scene in which Vanellope finds herself in a dressing room full of Disney princesses, the filmmakers reunited 11 of the original voice actors, including Jodi Benson (Ariel from The Little Mermaid), Paige O’Hara (Belle from Beauty and the Beast), Linda Larkin (Jasmine from Aladdin), Anika Noni Rose (Tiana from The Princess and the Frog), Mandy Moore (Rapunzel from Tangled) and Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel (Anna and Elsa from Frozen, respectively). They know the character better than we do.”Īt times, extreme measures were taken to achieve verisimilitude.

“It just felt right to us to include them,” says Spencer, “even to the point of having the Marvel team look at the Groot animation. (His answers are always the same: “I am Groot.”) But even with Disney IP, Johnston and Moore made sure to consult with creators. Even Baby Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy makes an appearance, on a website Ralph and Vanellope visit called “Ask Groot Anything,” in which the treelike alien fields random questions. Buzz Lightyear, Iron Man and C-3PO all have screen time. Not surprisingly, among the easiest characters to get permission to use were from home studio Disney. “Our production team met with our legal team on a weekly basis for the entire movie,” recalls Loftis. That meant an extensive clearance process. Fortunately for the filmmakers, none of those brands required clearance - copyright law considers it “fair use” to reference them - but specific characters from video games, like Sonic and Pac-Man, most certainly did.


Along with eBay, Google makes an appearance, as does Amazon. Like Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sprawling mashup of pop-culture iconography, only in this case the iconography is websites and online games. “We decided to stick with the idea that it was eBay and have the audience see the auctioneers working at eBay.” They even brought in real auctioneers to voice the endless sales chatter for everything from a portrait titled “Sorrowful Kitten” to the Sugar Rush steering wheel that Vanellope and Ralph spend much of the film hunting down. “We felt that if we tried to change the name or make some variation on it, the audience would get confused,” says producer Clark Spencer.
