Ron’s Gone Wrong (2021)

(Disney Streaming, January 2022) Techno-skepticism makes it to family animated movies in Ron’s Gone Wrong, a middle-school comedy that doubles as a metaphor for how technology increasingly pervades our kid’s experiences. Here, a fictional company called Bubble develops an all-purpose robot (“B-bot”) meant to help kids make friends, but our story focuses on the only boy at his school without a B-bot. Out of desperation, his parents finally find him one—a damaged unit that should have been scrapped and barely works out of the box. Much of the main plot has our protagonist dealing with a not-so-defective robot and navigating the tricky web of social interactions at school, but there’s an arguably more interesting subplot showing how well-intentioned technology can be misused by people with less noble motives. Fortunately, Ron’s Gone Wrong works well in the execution: while the film shies away from telling people to destroy their phones and delete their social media accounts, it does make a reasonable case for technology as a help for fulfilling human desires rather than becoming a goal by itself. The animation is quite good (especially from newcomer Locksmith Animation, even if it has the Aardman pedigree), and the script is a well-engineered machine. The culmination of much of the craziness is a wild playground sequence that makes not sense from an IT security viewpoint, but does get a few laughs. As a family film, Ron’s Gone Wrong is more interesting than many, considering that adults will keep making the techno-parallels that may be missed by some of the younger audiences.