Ron’s Gone Wrong

Rating

Director

Sarah Smith, Jean-Philippe Vine

Screenplay

Peter Baynham, Sarah Smith

Length

1h 47m

Starring

Jack Dylan Grazer, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Olivia Colman, Rob Delaney, Justice Smith, Kylie Cantrall, Ricardo Hurtado, Cullen James McCarthy, Ava Morse, Marcus Scribner, Thomas Barbusca, Sarah Miller

MPAA Rating

PG

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Review

Movies designed for children shouldn’t just about entertaining them. They should also be about educating them and preparing them for life as adults. Ron’s Gone Wrong meets both necessities successfully.

For Ron’s Gone Wrong, filmmakers Sarah Smith and Jean-Phillipe Vine and screenwriters Smith and Peter Baynham look at school life in the not-so-distant future when technology has progressed to a point where individual companions can be mass produced. For this film, the companions are produced by a young tech executive with big ideals who has designed something called a B-bot, a pal for kids and teens so that they never have to be alone. The one fly in the ointment is that poor kids can’t afford them. Ron (voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer) is one such kid. His mother died years before and his dad (Ed Helms) is selling junky novelties to bring in the bare minimum needed to survive. His grandmother (Olivia Colman) is from the “old world” where she butchers her own chickens and adheres to familial traditions.

Everyone in Ron’s school has a B-bot, including the members of an old group of friends who’ve each gone their separate ways. His hopes rest on his birthday gift, which doesn’t come to pass, but his family feels bad and goes to great lengths to get him one, but the unit they obtain is defective and malfunctions, including failing to download its safety settings, which helps Ron go beyond what his friends can do, but draws the unwanted attention of the tech giant that produced them, an Apple riff called Bubble.

The ovoid-shaped B-bots act like social interaction devices, picking friends, sharing information and generally helping the child come out of their shells even if they weren’t in one. Not only had Ron lost all of his friends previously, he’s further set aside as different because he doesn’t have one. Throw in an added plot about corporate greed and data mining and you have a film that travels familiar ground while also sharing a unique perspective befitting modern younger audiences.

20th Century Animation, formerly Blue Sky, which now falls under the Disney banner, has had a checkered history of animated features. This, however, was one of their best efforts to date. Whether this marks a new direction for the studio or is a blip remains to be seen. When Disney acquired Pixar, it was already a formidable house. Bringing Pixar in actually helped elevate their own flagging output. Perhaps Pixar and now Disney can help turn 20th Century around and make it a far more consistently high quality operation. If they had any influence over this film, then the signs are good.

While the device at the heart of the film is fictitious, it’s not terribly different from the iPhone when it first came out. Only those who could afford it got one and most everyone else was envious. They were popular enough to become a ubiquitous element of everyday life, though some feel they’ve eroded social interaction to the point of making kids more insular rather than more social. This would befit the thinking of a parent and grandparent like Ron’s who see no reason to jump on the latest trend, but as they discover the social burdens placed on their youngest member for not being able to fit in, they come to understand the point of such a gadget. The one erroneous element of the script that does loom over it is the fact that while iPhones might have isolated people in their immediate proximity, it opened up broader, sometimes international, environments for them to explore and allowed them to make friends internationally, finding those who shared their interests rather than requiring them to fit in with people in a local area that didn’t always meet that need.

Yet, there’s also the flipside where those who produce such inventions aren’t always seeing things altruistically. While Bubble’s CEO (Justice Smith) created the device for noble means, there are others in his company, a money/power-hungry executive (Rob Delaney) specifically, who want to further monetize the devices. The film progresses in a largely familiar pattern with rising and falling action at fitting moments, but the end result presents many sociological and moral quandaries that it happily answers even in the expected way. It reaches out to the kid and effectively explains the potential for exploitation and allows them to understand core facts about our world and their place in it.

There are plenty of moments in the film that will tickle adults, allowing them to sit down with their kids and share the experience while also answering any thornier questions the film raises. How they interact with their children as a result will largely influence how they eventually grow up. Unlike a lot of what we see in animation, this film does a fine job setting up its premise, presenting it to its audience, and giving them the tools necessary to think about its theories and conclusions. Ron’s Gone Wrong might not be a great film, but like many of the best animated films, it does more than just entertain the viewer and that’s all we can ask for.

Review Written

November 6, 2022