Keeping up with the internet’s constant evolution also involved figuring out exactly what path through the web would prove most interesting for Ralph and Vanellope to browse as they travel the Ethernet ether in search of a replacement part for Vanellope’s game, Sugar Rush. (Broken…yet again!) The directors equate the endless narrative opportunity to the way ambitious auteur filmmakers fancy Manhattan. “It’s like if you said, ‘I want to make a movie about New York. We’re going to tell a New York story.’ That can go a million different ways,” says Moore. “But what type of story do you want to tell in New York? So we really started with our two main characters’ friendship and the difference in their approach.”

As Moore puts it, “Ralph and Vanellope are two people from this little town, this arcade world, who seem to everyone else that they’re exactly the same in their point of view, but upon going to a bigger place, we start to see what cracks develop between these two. We very quickly come to realize they don’t have the same point of view. Ralph likes the comfort of his small town. And Vanellope, upon going to the Internet, starts to think, ‘Just being here is expanding my horizons.’ We bounce the story off that dynamic between the old and the new.”

“It just reinforced to me that people are hungry for these films to be more than just entertainment,” echoes Moore. “They’re hungry for discussions that they have in their car as they’re driving home from the movie theater. They don’t want to just go to laugh or to cry. They want them to mean something.”

Check out the new trailer for Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2, which will hit theaters Nov. 21, 2018, above.