BB Exclusive: Directors Phil Johnston and Rich Moore Talk Their New Movie, Ralph Breaks the Internet

Tomorrow, November 21, Disney Animation will release their new movie, Ralph Breaks the Internet. The movie is a follow up to the hit 2012 movie, Wreck-It Ralph.

BeautifulBallad had the amazing opportunity to sit down with other members of the press (Leslie Combemale of TheCredits and Eddie Pasa of DC Filmdom) to talk to the directors of the movie, Phil Johnston and Rich Moore. During our conversation, we talked about bringing the Princess scene to life, the villain, balancing satire and sweetness and so much more. Heads up this interview may contain spoilers for the movie, so read at your own risk.

On transforming the Princess characters from their original 2D aesthetics to 3D animation:

Moore: “We had to play with their scale a little bit because when we lined up all the Princesses side by side from their movies, the way that they appear, their scales were way off. Some were much taller because they had smaller heads, like 9 heads high. Some were about 7 heads high and, I can’t remember which one, was only about 5 heads high, so there was some really big differences in their scales. We had to bring them all to one uniformed scale, and on top of that, since they’re all in different styles in their movies, Corey Loftis (Production Designer) and Ami Thompson (Art Director) gave them [the animators] an aesthetic that we call the ‘Oh My Disney’ aesthetic to say ‘Well these aren’t Princesses right out of their movie’, but they are more avatars you would find on a website like Oh My Disney. And it is a little bit in the style of the first Wreck-It Ralph movie that’s a little more cartoony. The characters are less realistic, so that part of getting an overall aesthetic to them.”

On working with Disney Supervising Animator, Mark Hehn on the Princesses scenes in the movie:

Moore: “He animated so many of these Princesses in the ‘80s and ‘90s and into the 2000s with Tiana in The Princess and the Frog. Mark was our secret weapon. He was at every dailies review, our animation dailies, and did both Cintiq draw overs and also was doing thumbnails on his own.”

Johnston: “An animator would walk out after we gave them the review of their shot and then Mark would just hand over the paper (the thumbnail). It was like Picasso giving you a napkin sketch like ‘Oh my God’. But he was there every day. Every animation review there’s Mark sitting there with his notes.”

Moore: “I, of course, knew of Mark in animation because he is a legend, but I never really knew him that well. I came to really love this guy. His commitment to the movies, his good natured humor, he’s a person that could say ‘Well, maybe this is going a little too far.’”

On the actresses who reprised their Princess character role:

Moore: “They saw the value of this scene. It was being done with love for the characters, but also having some fun at our own expense. After we recorded we would facilitate meetings with the entire animation crew and each actress just to get their insight on who the characters were. We would have a conversation with two halves of this character brain [the actress voicing the role and Hehn] trying to figure out who was this character exactly and for a director in animation that was amazing.”

You can read the rest of the interview under the jump. Ralph Breaks the Internet will hit theaters tomorrow, November 21. Make sure to check it out!

Photo source: Disney Animation

On if there were any ideas that didn’t make into the first movie that had to be in this movie:

Johnston: “I will say that the Slaughter Race was a distant relative from an idea we had in the first movie. We were going to send Ralph to this game called ‘Extreme Easy Living 2’ which was sort of like a Sims style game. There was going to be competitive hot tubbing and flame throwers on cars and we loved it. It was really funny, but then we were like ‘That’s not an arcade game, but if we ever send him to the internet it could be an online game’. Even though Slaughter Race doesn’t resemble Extreme Easy Living 2, its DNA is somewhere in there. More than anything, there were a lot of ideas we had in the first movie that we couldn’t really use and some jokes bubbled back up and came into this one.”

On if there was anything they used in the first movie that they originally wanted to use in this movie, but it didn’t work:

Moore: “Cy-bugs maybe. We were like ‘Should we put Cy-bugs in from Heroes Duty’”.

Johnston: “We did for a minute. There was a Cy-bug when Felix and Calhoun adopted the 15 Sugar Race kids. Calhoun was an over indulging parent for a hot minute and brought a Cy-bug home for the children. It kept spraying acid all over the floor.”

On how many Ralphs there were in the Giant Ralph at the end:

Moore: “300,000. There were 300,000 little Ralphs to make the big one”.

Johnston: “And we didn’t cheat, so it is not just an outside layer over a shell. It’s layer upon layer. We had this idea for that to be the end of the film about a year and a half ago and we started working on animating it then and we only recently learned that 80% of the crew didn’t think it was possible. This is a logistical, technological challenge that we are not going to be able to meet. It was where the creative and the science of the technology behind our rendering software came together and made something really gross.”

On deciding to have the Giant Ralph be the villain:

Moore: “Once we hit on this story, it was always our goal that Ralph’s insecurity was the bad guy, was the villain of the piece. We wanted the climax of the film being that he finally lets her [Vanellope] go. That he is clutching, holding so tight that visually nothing would say it better than actually Ralph himself would let go. It seems like such an abstract visual that in the beginning we didn’t know exactly how we were going to do that. And, going down that road we said, ‘Well maybe what we are thinking is too heavy, it is too abstract. Maybe we just need a villain to play the antagonist’. We had for a moment a couple of villains.”

Johnston: “Double Dan was the arch villain at one moment. There was an anti-virus cop called, Bev, Built to Eradicate Viruses, that was trailing Ralph down like the Terminator.”

Moore: “Neither one of them felt like they were servicing the story of ‘Ralph is insecure’ nor holding on too tight to Vanellope. They did not embody that quality, so we said it has to be Ralph’s insecurity. I don’t know how we are going to get there, I don’t know how we are going to earn the visual but it has to be that. We just have to trust the answer is going to come the more we work the story. This was all before we knew there was going to be a virus that would clone Ralph and build all these clones of Ralph filling the internet. That all came when we gave ourselves no option, it has to be Ralph.”

On how they were able to balance the satire and the sweetness in this movie:

Johnston: “The writing is something I’m very proud of. The tone of both of these films and, to me, walking the tightrope of sharp satire and abiding love for the characters is the sweet spot. I’m not entirely sure how it’s done, other than many of the closest relationships in my life are based on making fun of each other. I love my family, I love my friends and we spend half our time insulting each other. And that is the greatest form of love. All I can say is I love these characters so much that whatever satire is there we have a very distinct view of the world. In my heart I have great hope for the world and love for human beings and I want to find some kindness and some good.”

On working with a number of females, including screenwriter, Pamela Ribon on this movie and their input into the ending:

Moore: “We have a lot of cynics on our crew and when we can win them over we know we have something.”

Johnston: “Our story room is half men, half women. Our Head of Story is a woman, Pam [Ribon] is my co-writer. I think you want as many points of view as you can have. We have people from 25 countries who worked on our film.”

Moore: “We have people where this is their first job and we people who have been in the business for years.”

Johnston: “And you need those voices and it is up to us to channel it all into a movie that makes sense.”

Moore: “Pam writes some of the dirtiest, meanest jokes.”

Johnston: “We have to pull her back.”

Moore: “Her wit is like ‘Ouch, Pam that hurts. That’s sharp’.”

On if it was hard getting permission to have all the Disney characters in the movie:

Moore: “Well, to best explain what we wanted to do rather than going in abstractly describing to our colleagues what it was we were thinking we thought, ‘Let’s just make it. Let’s just make a rough version of the Princess scene’. It was just an animatic. It was all just the storyboard panels, a dialogue track, and it reflected pretty closely to what is in the movie now, and we made that and we showed it to people at our studio, directors and writers, and people loved it. Then we took it across the street to our colleagues at the main lot and the response was just as warm as our colleagues at the animation studio. We were even encouraged to go further. ‘What about Marvel? What about Star Wars?’ And we knew we wanted it to be somewhere where all of these characters were together and around all the time. There’s this fansite, ‘Oh My Disney’ that traffics in all the Disney stuff and we’re being encouraged to be this big umbrella so why not just throw it all in there. No one ever said no. It was the opposite. It was almost like encouragement to do more because I think the appeal was ‘Well, the rest of the world likes to bag on Disney, why can’t we do a satire of ourselves? What can’t we have some fun at our own expense?’”

On if Bill Hader voices the character of Spamley:

Johnston: “Listen, we don’t know who is Spamley. We don’t know who that person is.”

Moore: “What I did is I built an algorithm using all of Sir Laurence Olivier’s dialogue. Broke it down because we wanted the great Laurence Olivier to play Spamley.”

Johnston: “Listen, you can speculate all you want on the internet. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s not the point that is an uncredited character.”

Moore: “No, it is my algorithm.”

Johnston: “Maybe we want conspiracy theorists speculating who played the character. I don’t know”.

On what Kelly MacDonald says as Merida at the end of the Princess scene:

Johnston: “Merida is saying an old traditional Scottish toast.”

Moore: “How does it go again?”

Johnston: “May a mouse never leave your girnel with a teardrop in his eye. Meaning a girnel’s a barrel that holds food or whiskey and if it [the mouse] has a teardrop in its eye that means it’s empty. So if it’s full you will have food in your house and warmth in your heart.”