Up until about a third of the way through the film, Ralph Breaks the Internet had me worried. It wasn’t doing anything new, and the conflict was a pretty soft one, and I was afraid the film wasn’t going to give us anything like the joy¹ we got from Wreck-It Ralph.

And then it got better. Lots better. We’ve known for years that Princess Vanellope is technically (and literally, and actually) a Disney princess. Disney owned this, and went on to own (and give themselves a good roasting for) all the associated princess tropes they’ve built during the last eighty years.

Snippets of the “princesses” scene have appeared in trailers, but the full scene takes it further. And then Disney doubled-down on it, and gave Vanellope a very, VERY Disney Princess moment of her own.

Speaking of trailers, there’s a trailer for the film which features a mobile game called “Pancake Milkshake.” I felt just a little robbed when that scene didn’t appear in the film, but then I sat through the credits and let’s just say that if you feel robbed about that kind of thing you should sit through all the credits too.

Ralph Breaks the Internet clears my Threshold of Awesome, and is going to be on my must-buy list when the Blu-Ray is available.

¹ Wreck-It Ralph also gives us a master class in how to unflinchingly bottom out the protagonist during that moment when they do the wrong thing by trying to do the right thing. I still cry when Ralph smashes that car.
² The comparison between this sequel and the sequel to The Incredibles is a stark³ one. With Ralph I felt like there was serious risk of Disney letting us down, but they knocked it out of the park. I felt like Disney/Pixar had an easy win with The Incredibles II, but they managed to foul out.
³ If I were the sort of person to make pop culture puns I’d say the comparison goes beyond being merely stark, and heads into the territory of Eddard Stark, but I’m not that sort of person⁴.
⁴ Because footnotes don’t count. 

I finally made it back out of the house to see a movie. I wish I’d enjoyed the movie more.

Fantastic Crimes of Beastly Grindelwald or Something Like That suffers from some altogether too common pop-cinema ailments. Unmotivated action, Flanderization, and tokenism top my list, but I should also point out that it felt long and by the end I didn’t really care what happened to key characters, and those are more likely to dampen the spirits of movie-goers.

Unmotivated action is pretty easy to understand. It’s when you don’t think a character would do a thing, and the story never gets around to explaining why the character did the thing.

Flanderization is when a character in a series begins as a well-rounded, interesting person with quirks, but as the series progresses they are defined only by their quirks. It gets its name from Ned Flanders of Simpsons fame. Fantastic Beast’s Queenie Goldstein captivated us in the first film with her mind-reading, her smarts, her cooking, her effortless beauty, her kindness, and yes, being a little ditzy. This film mostly just gave us ditzy. It was pretty disappointing.

Tokenism is when a demographic is represented by only one character in the film, and it’s made worse when that character falls into one or more negative stereotypes. The only Asian woman in the film, Nagini, played by Claudia Kim (you may remember her as Doctor Helen Cho from Age of Ultron) happens to be cursed to turn into a giant serpent. Because serpent-ness is an Asian thing?

The good news is that everyone on screen did brilliantly with what they were given. Even when they weren’t given very much, they acted it to the nines, and did everything they could to make it work.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald doesn’t quite fall past my Threshold of Disappointment because I wasn’t expecting much. It doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, however, which leaves it in far too ordinary a place for something with “fantastic” right in the title.