Ron’s Gone Wrong, the new animated movie written by the British team behind 2011’s Arthur Christmas – Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham – is now available on Disney Plus. It stars Jack Dylan Grazer, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms.
The family movie is about Barney – a middle school kid who enlists the help of Ron, a social media robot, to help him improve his standing at school. But Ron is not the most legit of latest devices, he’s a knock-off version or maybe second-hand, meaning that his malfunctions lead to things getting very messy for Barney.
Ron’s Gone Wrong is the second animated movie of the year about robots going haywire, after Netflix’s critically-acclaimed The Mitchells vs The Machines. The brains behind both movies have had to strike that balance of making a funny and entertaining movie for kids, while also including some of the pitfalls of modern technology.
As Zach Galifianakis told The Digital Fix; “it’s not just commenting on modern friendships. I think it’s also starting to question what all of this [technology] is doing to us as humans and society.”
Jean-Philippe Vine, one of the co-directors of Ron’s Gone Wrong, also told The Digital Fix that; “It was really important to us that we didn’t make this movie feel like medicine. It was actually a very good note from [the studio] executives, you know, they were very keen that [the movie] plays for its own entertainment value, while also exploring the overarching idea of our relationship world as it is now when you see it through social media.”
He continued; “We really had to kind of pick our battles. First of all, it’s about the comedy of these two, quirky outsiders trying to figure out a relationship. And at the same time, in terms of tech, we were really making sure that it was more about the way the kids are starting to see themselves and becoming an in a way more isolated, by just being connected with things like them and it just becomes this slowly diminishing circle of friendship.”
It sounds as though, with us now more isolated than ever due to ongoing lockdowns and schooling or working from home, that Ron’s Gone Wrong could not have come out at a more relevant time.
Make sure to catch it now on Disney Plus, if you missed it in the cinemas!