What went wrong with Wreck-It Ralph 2

A few weeks back I watched Wreck-It Ralph 2 - Ralph Breaks The Internet in the cinema and was - well, underwhelmed. At the time, I still thought it was OK. The animation is top-notch: it's hard not to be a little invested when the characters' pain at some fresh betrayal is so well-animated. Overall, I liked the side characters introduced in the film, and the Internet setting had some neat ideas. The part with the Disney princesses turned out to be more enjoyable than I'd anticipated. I'm still not wild about the "are you a princess?" interrogation scene, but in the end the fun-poking at princess tropes is pretty mild and a far cry from Shrek territory, plus the girls turn out to be handy in a crisis. There's also a really fun song where Vanellope channels her inner Disney princess and by "looking at water" realises what she really wants: to be a part of the tough, unpredictable internet game Slaughter Race. As time goes on, though, I find that the problems with the film start to grate on me more. Even on the same evening as I watched it, I thought (not without some grim satisfaction for having called it): "I guess Disney's golden revival era really is over". Now I'm even more convinced. Frozen 2 will need to be pretty spectacular in order to turn around the downward trend.

If online comments on places such as Youtube (which incidentally features under the threadbare disguise of "BuzzTube" in the film) are anything to go by, I wasn't the only one who was vaguely dissatisfied with Wreck-It Ralph 2. Few think it's downright bad, but they have various problems with it: the depiction of the Internet is too generic; Ralph behaves badly; Vanellope behaves badly; we see too little of the lovable side characters from the Arcade; the image of a computer virus in the shape of Ralph - made out of a teeming horde of needy virus Ralphs - is uncomfortable etc. I more or less agree with all of these criticisms, but what made these faults worse was the plot itself.

Quite simply, the film falls into the classic sequel trap of telling us a story which few of us wanted to see. The first Wreck-It Ralph film was mostly about Ralph accepting his role as the bad guy in his Arcade game and realising 1) that his was an important job that kept the whole game going 2) that he didn't have to be a bad guy off stage, as it were. His friendship with kid racer Vanellope in the game Sugar Rush played a large part in his acceptance of his lot, and in the touching ending of the film he admits that being thrown off the roof in his game, once he's been defeated by a player, is his favourite part of the day, because from up there he can see Vanellope racing in Sugar Rush. Now, who saw this scene and thought: "Isn't Ralph being a little clingy? Should so much of his happiness really rest on his bond with Vanellope? Wouldn't it be healthier if he gave her some space and made some other friends as well?"

I sure as heck didn't. Yet in this sequel, the message being peddled is the one the Earl of Grantham, with some justice, dismissed as a "slogan" in the Downton Abbey finale: "If you love her, you have to let her go". I didn't like the "don't be too needy" theme in Finding Nemo, and though it's not quite as enervating here as the stakes aren't so high, it still bothered me. It's not that this message is never relevant for kids as well as adults, but there's something finger-wagging about it, and unlike many a pat moral which you can just about swallow (all the while thinking "well, duh"), it's just not very compatible with family-friendly entertainment. I can't be the only one who doesn't find it enjoyable to watch someone being chastised for caring too much.

Of course all ends well, and Ralph's and Vanellope's friendship survives being long-distance. But I would have been happy to leave them both in the Arcade, happy with their roles in their respective games and with each other. In the end, watching Wreck-It Ralph 2 - Ralph Breaks The Internet subtracts a little from the experience of watching the first film - and that's something a sequel should do its best to avoid.