RON’S GONE WRONG
RON’S GONE WRONG I A boy bonds with a wonky ’bot in new Brit animation.
Breaking down the Disney flick’s component parts.
Inspiration can strike in the strangest places. Take Ron’s Gone Wrong, the first film from box-fresh British animation studio Locksmith. Co-written and co-directed by Aardman veteran Sarah Smith (Arthur Christmas), Ron… was born during a viewing of - believe it or not Spike Jonze sci-fi Her. “I thought, ‘We have to make that film for kids,’” says Smith of the unlikely influence. “I wanted to make a movie about kids’ relationships with screens and online friendships.”
Jack Dylan Grazer (Luca, Shazam!) stars as 13-year-old Barney, a middle school outsider whose oddball family - including WFH dad Ed Helms and Bulgarian Grandma Olivia Colman buy him a B*Bot for his birthday. In Barney’s world, ‘Bubble Bots’ are as ubiquitous as smartphones, customisable robo-pals who know everything about you out of the box. But ‘Ron’ fell off the back of a van (literally), and Barney’s broken robo-buddy has a lot to learn.
Voiced by Zach Galifianakis, the ‘cheerfully dysfunctional’ Ron is two microchips short of a circuit board. Think, what if your “baby cousin was Borat, and came to live with you” says Smith, who co-wrote the script with Borat scribe Peter Baynham. While a standard B*Bot can display slick hi-res visuals around its capsule body, Ron can barely muster a few pixels. But that literal blank slate is what makes Ron special. “It’s like the Penguin in The Wrong Trousers,” Smith points out. “It’s what you do with less.”
Ron’s ability to learn and operate outside the strict parameters of his programming make him a threat to tech giant Bubble, and a target for disgruntled COO Andrew (Rob Delaney).
The darker side of our dependence on technology won’t be ignored, but Smith and co-director Jean-Philippe Vine had no intention of telling an ‘anti-technology’ story.
“The B*Bot is pure technological joy,” Vine says. “We really wanted to sell that idea to the max, and use the comedy of Ron to make sure we’re not preaching at anybody.” Smith and Vine are confident they’ve hit the right balance. “We asked kids after one very early screening: what sort of bot would they want?” Smith recalls. “And they said, ‘We want ones that are a bit like Ron!’ I went, ‘OK, we did it. Yay!’”
As the debut film produced by the UK’s first dedicated CG animation studio, Locksmith,
Ron… may yet prove a landmark film for British animation. Alongside producer Julie Lockhart, Smith set out to create a hub for computer animation in the UK after making Arthur Christmas entirely out of LA. “My big thing was: why isn’t there a big studio like this in London?” Smith says. “So I literally downloaded ‘How To Write A Business Plan’ from Barclays’ website, and here we are!” JF
ETA | TBC / RON’S GONE WRONG IS COMING OUT IN CINEMAS SOON.
‘WHAT IF YOUR BABY COUSIN WAS BORAT, AND CAME TO LIVE WITH YOU’ SARAH SMITH