“Ron’s Gone Wrong,” a film first announced in 2017, is the debut feature from Locksmith Animation, a British animation company founded in 2014. With an animation team including veterans from Aardman and Pixar (amongst others) and animation provided by DNEG (Christopher Nolan’s go-to effects house, who recently worked on “Dune,” “F9” and “Godzilla vs. Kong”), Locksmith is an exciting new studio in a world dominated by heavy hitters and legacy players. Of course, what seemed somewhat outside of the mainstream in 2017 can change quickly, and “Ron’s Gone Wrong” went from being a Fox project (whose longstanding in-house animation studio Blue Sky Studios was quietly shuttered earlier this year) to a 20th Century Studios release following Disney’s acquisition of the studio. And an ever-shifting release date, partially due to the pandemic, meant that it is now the second animated feature in 2021 to be centered around robots run amok and the second to star “It” standout Jack Dylan Grazer in a mismatched, non-human buddy scenario. Even after all that, “Ron’s Gone Wrong” still manages to charm, thanks largely to the dazzling animation and esoteric choices.
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Set in an undetermined near-future, “Ron’s Gone Wrong” quickly establishes its world – a monolithic tech company called Bubble (its headquarters housed in a series of cascading bubbles, a riff on Apple’s UFO campus) has introduced B-Bots, a tiny robot friend that kids cannot live without. B-Bots, shaped like pills and adorned with graphic “skins” (some of which come from other Disney IP, undoubtedly a last-minute addition like the Marvel nods in “Free Guy”), can do it all – record you for your next live stream, zip around like an RC car, and connect you to every form of social media. They are sort of like EVE from “WALL•E” if her mission was to increase your follower count instead of repopulating a planet. Of course, our hero, Barney (Grazer), comes from a lower-income Bulgarian family. His mother has passed away, and he and his disheveled dad (Ed Helms) live with his maternal grandmother (Olivia Colman) in a ramshackle home/farm complex. His family can’t afford a B-Bot, but for his birthday they arrange to get him one that has fallen off the back of a truck – literally, it is all damaged and scuffed up.
Almost as soon as Barney gets the packaging opening, he understands that there is something off about this robot, who he dubs Ron. Instead of the slick graphic style of the other B-bots, Ron is “naked,” his inner workings faintly visible (shades of Baymax, the lovable inflatable robot from Disney’s “Big Hero 6”) and his face a glitchy, 8-bit smile. Without a connection to the Bubble cloud, he is unsophisticated and only has access to some of his programming (and none of the potential parental controls and safeguards that other units have), his speech pattern a charming, wide-eyed chirp (provided by Zach Galifianakis). Soon enough, Bubble realizes that the unpredictability of Ron has potential catastrophic repercussions for the company that built him, led by an idealistic designer (Justice Smith) and a more mercurial CEO (Rob Delaney). It would be a big problem if the rest of the B-bots, like Ron, went wrong.
As far as set-up goes, that’s solid. Countless classics, both animated and otherwise, have been mined from the enthralling dynamic of a human character interacting with a non-human one. Everything from “E.T.” to “Lilo & Stitch” has harvested this concept into something special; both characters become more human because of the friendship they forge. And “Ron’s Gone Wrong” covers similar territory. The warmly rendered picture of Barney’s home life, while full of heartache and loneliness (early scenes have an almost Roald Dahl-level of fantastical bleakness), is juxtaposed by the blank expansiveness of the scenes set at Bubble HQ. Barney, tired of his hardscrabble existence, is at first annoyed by his robot companion’s imperfections and then comes to appreciate those imperfections, just as those in Barney’s life come to realize that he’s not a weirdo outsider either but just an awkward kid yearning for connection. In other words, the characters in “Ron’s Gone Wrong” realize that the bugs are a feature.
And that emotional core of “Ron’s Gone Wrong” is easy to appreciate, as is the genuinely jaw-dropping animation and character design, particularly during a stretch of the movie when Ron and Barney are marooned in the woods (a sequence that, perhaps not coincidentally, draws the most comparison to Brad Bird’s boy-and-his-robot masterpiece “The Iron Giant”). But the movie occasionally stumbles in the story department, overreaching to encompass more themes and ideas that essentially take away from the charming dynamic between Barney and Ron. As the movie goes along, it piles on concerns – the toxic effect of social media on children (an even more pressing issue in light of the recent Facebook leaks), the overreaching of oppressive tech companies, how idealistic visions can be corrupted by corporate meddling – and it causes what is a charming, simple story, to become overly complicated and intermittently worrisome. There could have been a way to convey these ideas in a more streamlined, efficient way. As it stands, “Ron’s Gone Wrong” is somewhat clumsy and awkward, the version 1.0 of a much more user-friendly interface.
But even its narrative hiccups can’t prevent “Ron’s Gone Wrong” from being a fun, endlessly charming adventure. (The imposed Disney-fication never becomes too overbearing either; even the reference to the now Disney-owned “Predator” is subtle enough.) This is a movie with a lot of heart, committed performances by all of the actors, and a wonderful look, supplied by industry veterans working at the top of their craft. And, like Ron himself, the movie is just different enough to stand apart from the Disney/Pixar/DreamWorks crowd to leave an impression. In short, “Ron’s Gone Wrong” does a lot right. [B]
“Ron’s Gone Wrong” hits theaters on October 22.