Big Hero 6. Wall-E. The Mitchell’s vs. the Machines. These are just a few of the animated films/stories Ron’s Gone Wrong has actively stolen material from. Sorry, um, borrowed material from to create their movie. But you know what? Stealing from the great animated films of the last 20 or so years is probably a smart idea if you want to make your movie good. What Ron’s Gone Wrong lacks in originality it makes up for with a strong base to tell a kids tale, making all of them tweet #PoopGirl after they leave the theater.
Ron’s Gone Wrong, is funnily not about Ron. It’s about Barney (Jack Dylan Grazer) a relatively poor kid with a hardworking but strange dad (Ed Helms) and grandma (Olivia Colman). Ron’s school days are traumatizing for him, as he’s the only kid in school without the flashy new B-bot friend bots created by Bubble Company CEO Marc (Justice Smith) and COO Andrew (Rob Delaney). This toyless disconnected existence isolates him from his peers. Desperate, his dad finagles a B-bot purchase for his kid: Ron (Zach Galifanakis). Ron however, has been damaged and is disconnected from Bubble’s cloud, meaning he has no filters, no safety measures, and is basically a blank slate Barney can craft into his friend, hopefully without drawing negative attention to Bubble and their very popular new toy.
For a long time, Ron’s Gone Wrong has a pretty strong message about kids and technology today, and a lot of thoughts on the subject. We start off with Barney being the poorer, technologyless kid. Today, if you aren’t commenting/livestreaming/communicating through a social media, you might as well not exist, which is exactly how Barney feels. Also, his classmates have lost the ability to communicate with others person to person: their social medias demand too much of their time. This is music to the ears of the Bubble COO, who sees all of these new devices as a way to sell to kids: sell early, and sell often. These poor kids are caught in the crossfire, trapped in a toxic relationship with the Bubble social media, which can be thrilling when good to them, but turn on them in a moment if the algorithm decides its more popular to make fun of them. For the company, $$$$ is the only language they care about; stunting kids relationship development is unimportant to them. Also, as soon as their profits are threatened, the company breaks a lot of laws/rules, abusing the technology for their own gain.
And here’s Barney and Ron, offgrid, forging a real friendship from scratch. Ron’s Gone Wrong is actually a lot about what Barney/Ron’s pure friendship gets right, about that amazing moment when you make a connection with a brand new person in real life, unburdened by a company’s desire to sell you things. Ron is clearly pilfered from Baymax, an optimistic blank slate untethered from social media. Almost all of the best laughs come from his direct, terse approach to conversations, trying to learn how to be Barney’s friend and how the world works. The movie has these wonderful little moments of Ron growing and learning things about his Buddy, a light in the darkness of some of those tough teenage years. So even when the third act starts going a little off the rails with its messaging and chase sequences, the Ron/Barney friendship holds the movie together, creating a shocking amount of real poignancy in what becomes of them.
Ron’s Gone Wrong shows some of the highs 20th Century Animation can hit when they find the right, if stolen, subject matter. The movie’s also a wonderful reminder to maybe try to make a new friend of you can, and use social media for its purest purpose, connecting with people you wouldn’t otherwise meet on a day to day basis. I imagine this movie will also inspire very ironic social media hashtags advocating to log off social media as well, that I will definitely make fun of.