Populating Ralph Breaks the Internet

A couple months ago I was a guest of Disney Animation Studios during their Ralph Breaks The Internet press day. Last month I shared some behind the scenes details we learned that day. Guess what? I have even more fun Ralph Break the Internet details to share.

In the sequel to Wreck-it Ralph, Ralph and Vanellope head into the internet on a mission to save her game, Sugar Rush.  Their world limited to the characters in the games at Litwak’s arcade is now multiplied by thousands when they arrive on the world wide web.

Fun Facts About Populating Ralph Breaks The Internet

Ralph Breaks the Internet is much bigger

Ralph Breaks the Internet requires thousands of more characters than past animated films. The Ralph team imagined that the internet is a 3-dimensional space that has built up over time. It’s layers and layers of the internet going back to the early days of Myspace and Netscape with newer sites built up over them.

• 10 years ago, the animated film Bolt had only 57 characters.
• Wreck it Ralph had 223 unique characters with 421 variants.
• Zootopia had 182 unique character animals with 687 variants.
• Ralph Breaks the Internet has 434 characters with 6,752 variants. Once they start swapping out skin, t-shirt and hair color, they have 500,000 options!

To create thousands of characters the animators would change the body shape, the nose, the eyes, hair length, skin color, and clothing. The end result is thousands of variations that populated the internet.

Populating Ralph Breaks the Internet

To populate Ralph Breaks The Internet they started by bringing over all the original characters from Wreck it Ralph, minus Turbo of course. 😉

Then they started creating new characters which are divided into two groups, Net Users, and Netizens.

What Does the internet’s population look like?

You and I are Net Users who go on to the internet to shop, play a game or search a topic. They are simplified versions of ourselves. Sort of like avatars of us as we walk around the internet.

Netizens are the internet workers, the citizens that are always on the internet helping us with our tasks. Imagine you are shopping for shoes on an online website. A netizen is a worker who pushes your shopping cart around on the internet and helps you check out at the cash register at that virtual store.  Or they could be the mailman on the internet, delivering your mail to the recipient when you hit send on an email.

Cool new Characters in Ralph Breaks the Internet

Yesss is one of the new characters in Ralph Breaks the Internet. She is the head algorithm and the heart and soul of the trend-making site “BuzzzTube.” Yesss is the curator of cool on the internet. She always knows the hottest thing on the internet and knew about it a second ago.

Her clothing and hair is inspired by fashion week models and is constantly changing to be most up to date and current. In fact, her faux fur coat is made up of fiberoptics, just like her hair. So data from the internet is constantly being received and she is changing to stay current. Yesss is voiced by Taraji P. Henson.

KnowsMore is the netizen for a search engine, sort of like Ask Jeeves. He is not as cool or up to date as Yesss. KnowsMore is the advertising mascot and netizen for his site. He is the only character in the film whose eyes are hand drawn and the rest is CG. It gives him a look inspired by the old animator style. He is voiced by Alan Tudyk.

I can’t wait to see all the new characters in Ralph Breaks the internet when it arrives in theaters on November 21st! Check out the trailer below for another peek at the movie.

Disney invited me to attend the #RalphBreakstheInternetEvent press day at Disney Animation Studios. The opinions expressed here are my own.