How 'Ralph Breaks The Internet' Transforms The World Wide Web Into A Fully-Realized World

Before we talk about the design of the world of Ralph Breaks The Internet, we need to give you the basic set-up of the story. It starts where things left off in Wreck-It Ralph. Vanellope and Ralph have remained friends, spending time together outside of their games when the arcade is closed. One day, their after-hours ritual is interrupted by a plugin alert: something new has been installed in Mr. Litwak's Family Fun Center & Arcade – something called WiFi.

The next day, a kid playing the Sugar Rush game ends up breaking the steering wheel off the arcade console. The game has long been discontinued, and the manufacturer is out of business. The kids find a replacement part on eBay, but even with the increased popularity of Sugar Rush, the price is more than the game makes in a year. So Mr. Litwak decides to pull the plug on the game, which leaves Vanellope homeless.

Ralph offers Vanellope a place to stay inside the Fix-It Felix game, building her a pillow fort on top of his building. She's devastated that her game is gone forever. If she's not a racer, what is she? She begins glitching and decides she needs to be alone and storms off. Ralph gets an idea to sneak into the internet router in the arcade to get to eBay to obtain the replacement part.

Ralph and Vanellope travel to the router for the first time. It turns out to be an unremarkable box, which Ralph remarks is not as impressive as it was described. The movie cuts to inside Litwak's small office in the arcade, with him figuring out how to turn the router on using his old iMac. As he presses the button, the router box transforms into a green high tech room like something out of Tron. Litwak's avatar appears in front of them inside the router and walks into a portal, and they follow him through the tunnel, shooting through the cord, into the telephone wires, eventually into the internet itself – a huge digital city. They end up in something that looks like a huge airport terminal.

The search bar Knowsmore sends them on a journey to eBay, a cavernous building filled with rows and rows of auctioneers, where there are tons of cubicles, each with their own auctioneer and Net Users watching. Among the items we see on auction include a Dorito chip with the face of Beyonce and a velvet painting of a kitten. Each row in the eBay headquarters has a sign, with the whole building organized by section, almost like a supermarket. They go to the video games aisle and start bidding on the steering wheel. Vanellope bids $1000 and Ralph starts bidding against her, clearly not smart enough to understand the concept of an auction. The steering wheel ends up selling for $27,001, and they get a voucher to bring to checkout for processing.

At the checkout counter, they are asked for a credit card, which they clearly don't have. So Ralph starts making up numbers. The "Netizen" at the register realizes that they don't have payment and tells them that they have 24 hours to pay before they forfeit the item.

How are two video game characters from a small arcade going to earn the money? They meet a character named Yesss at BuzzTube who has an idea. With only eight hours left before they need to pay the eBay bill, Yesss sends Vanellope to a fan site to market the viral videos she and Ralph created. The place she is sent is a fan site called OhMyDisney.com, which is described as everything Disney all under one roof. It is here that she somehow ends up in a dressing room with all of the Disney princesses, a scene that has been shown off at conventions and in the trailers.

Filmmakers Rich Moore and Phil Johnston say the reason they found to do a Wreck-It Ralph sequel was the comedy and conflict that comes from transporting our main characters from the small town of the arcade into to the virtual city of the internet.

The big challenge in developing this movie was to design an animated version of the internet that felt like the internet we use every day. On Zootopia, Moore and Johnston took their development team to Africa, on Moana they went to the South Pacific, and for Ralph Breaks the Internet, they took a luxurious research trip down the street to One Wilshire Blvd, a 30 story building in downtown Los Angeles which houses most of the internet connections in the western U.S. One-third of internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia passes through the structure.

As you might expect, the facility is filled with wires and boxes from top to bottom, which they used as inspiration for their virtual internet city. In the earliest animation tests, the internet city featured streets that look like the wired lanes in the building. They also photographed panels on computer motherboards and chips to help inspire the internet world's city grid.

The Internet is a three-dimensional vertical city, which means it functions on a different level than our real-world cities. For example, there are sidewalks on different levels and different ways into every building, envisioned like there are different ways into every website. The design language uses the 45-degree angles that you would see on a motherboard. The filmmakers populated the street with signage and holograms to add charm and color. There are other small touches, too: if you enter a travel website building, you are handed free cookies.

To create a never-ending metropolis, the team created a bunch of buildings that could be styled modularly in different variants, so when you look out into the horizon, it doesn't look like there is an end or repeat in structures. This was very resource-intensive, as you might imagine. The first time they tried to render the city with their Hyperion render facility, it never came back as it brute force overloaded the renderer.

They had to create a new process so that the computer rendering didn't break. To accomplish this, they broke down aspects of the world and rendered them separately. For instance, the banners on the sides of a building were rendered separately from the core structure. They were then able to combine all the rendered pieces into one shot, bringing together one cohesive world with many individual pieces.

Below you can see an example of the progression of one shot from story concept design to finalized shot, further showing you how each department contributes to the process. The information below each image is provided by Disney.

Visual development artists, often referred to as "vis dev" artists, are responsible for early visual exploration for what a film's characters and environments might look like on screen. They gather input from directors, the production designer and other key players in the production to create detailed images that relay the mood, tone and color an animated scene might convey. Vis dev artists work in various media, ranging from traditional paper and pencil to digital paint programs, to create art to inform and inspire the final look of the film. Featuring Cory Loftis as production designer, and Ami Thompson and Matthias Lechner as art director of characters and environments, respectively.

Animators are responsible for a character's performance. Given rough blocking from layout, animators bring the characters' movements to life, adding expression and personality. Artists establish guidelines for each character in terms of expression and movement, and are encouraged by directors to tap inspiration from voice talent performance, and even their own acting skills to refine character animation.

A massive world like the internet called for massive crowds—topping those featured in "Moana" and "Zootopia" combined. The sheer number of characters and vehicles in this single shot would be impossible to animate individually, so the crowds department, which was formed at Disney Animation on the original "Wreck-It Ralph" in 2012, created methods to proceduralize the effort. The character asset team creates various body shapes and sizes, as well as costume pieces that can be mixed and matched to create multiple looks. Animators subsequently create a variety of base movements for the crowd characters. The artists in the crowds department then work to procedurally place and animate these elements to build a crowd of characters and vehicles that functions independently. Moe El-Ali serves as crowds supervisor.

While sets in an animated scene are detailed and often extensive, a scene like this introduction to the internet is so expansive that filmmakers have to fill in the areas farthest from the action. Several techniques are utilized in set extension, including matte painting and advanced technology that tells the computer to reduce the detail/data in those areas farthest from the camera to make them visually appealing, but small enough in terms of data that they can be efficiently rendered.