I agree with just about everything here. I especially agree that I'm seriously hoping that Paperman was the Lasseter-driven "Tech Demo" that it appeared to be and that it does bode well for Lasseter giving us a full feature film in the next few years in that style, because that sort of marriage of modern technology and retro aesthetics absolutely deserves a full film and if Disney can one-two knock out a pair of years with a killer Feature Animation and a killer Pixar film back to back then all the power to them, for I welcome our new film animation overlords. (Same as the old film animation overlords…)

Anyway, in terms of over-analysis of subject matter that possibly doesn't warrant it: I thought Vaellope's character made sense within the world building we see in the film. First of all, clearly even a Princess in Sugar Rush isn't going to try to race in a dress (take that Mario Kart!) and it makes sense that maybe Vanellope's racer outfit was always a bit "low key" compared to her "official dress".

But the deeper analysis that made sense to me as I watched the film: I figured early on in the film that Vanellope's power was always the "glitch". All of the racer's seemed to have an individual "power up" or "special power", and Vanellope's "glitch" fit exactly in with the sort of thing you might expect from a candy-coated Mario Kart-esque game. Admittedly, on a game screen it would probably be called something cooler than "glitch" like "hyper dash" or what have you (but then given the vaguely Asian origin of Sugar Rush it also seems like the kind of thing the manual might overzealously call "Super Glitch Power, Yeah!", possibly as some strange engrish mis-translation), but definitely the kind of thing you could imagine seeing as a "Special Power" of the character. It's also the kind of potentially over-powered Special Power that you could see making the character a player favorite, and more importantly a perpetual winner. Given the hyper-competitive design of the entire game, I wouldn't be surprised if rather than a hereditary monarchy Sugar Rush followed something closer to a meritocracy. (Unfortunately that somewhat weakens the declaration that she should be called "President" instead, because clearly in the hyper-competitive Sugar Rush the Presidency would likely remain a meritocracy based on racing results, albeit possibly more susceptible to outside influence of individual player fickleness, skill, and spare change, than the presumable monarchy programmed around developer knowledge of the relative balance/OP-ness of in game character skills…)

I think that is why Turbo/King Candy can and does target Vanellope: her special ability in the game does make it easier to ostracize her as an unintended "glitch" in the game once he disconnects everyone's memory of her (and the meritocracy, which admittedly would be tied up with her code). More interestingly, I think this tells us WHY Turbo particularly targets her and seems to hold so much animosity to her: its not because he wants control of the monarchy (that's clearly incidental), its because he still wants to race in a popular game in the arcade and at his core he doesn't understand the shift in arcade racers in the 90s (when the simulationist and real physics racers briefly jumped to PC before making there way to home consoles) and Vanellope would very much personally represent all that was wrong with modern arcade racers to Turbo. Vanellope's very own special power is clearly a "cheat" to Turbo's old, old school style of racing, just as Turbo likely would have been confused/angered by race track shortcuts (though not made explicit in the film, I'm also willing to bet the volcano was merely a high-risk/reward shortcut that King Candy disapproved of and thus attempted to block) and all of the other sorts of cartoonish obstacles and "anyone can come from behind to win" game mechanics in a game like Sugar Rush.

I'm probably over-thinking all of that, but that's certainly the impression I got from the film.