We wanted to make a movie about kids’ friendships in the age of social media
The funny and touching animation Ron’s Gone Wrong is sure to delight audiences, but GEMMA DUNN discovers it has a deeper message
RON’S Gone Wrong is sure to strike a chord with just about everyone.
The heart-warming comedy – the first theatrical release from UKbased studio Locksmith Animation – tells the story of Barney Pudowski, a lovable but awkward schoolboy who is struggling to make friends.
He is simply missing the one thing that ensures popularity with his classmates: a B*Bot, a walking, talking, digitally connected device designed to be the perfect solution for navigating the challenges at school.
What he gets is Ron: a malfunctioning, freewheeling “best friend out of the box”, that forces the duo on a thrilling (yet chaotic) adventure that encapsulates the messiness of true friendship.
It was an idea born out of the filmmakers’ own childhood memories – and those of their kids, who had all faced the same problem at one point or another – feeling like they don’t fit in.
“Like every parent, I experienced that awful moment when my kid came home saying, ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with today’, and your heart breaks,” recalls Sarah Smith, who co-founded Locksmith Animation, and directs the film with Pixar veteran Jean-Philippe Vine and codirector Octavio E Rodriguez.
“But now they face the pressures of social media too, making it even harder.
“We wanted to make a movie about kids’ friendships in the social media age and that universal feeling that every child has that everyone else has got it all sorted except them. [But] most of us carry that feeling throughout our lives.”
“I remember being at the very grand home of a studio boss; it was a very swanky affair and I found myself standing alone at the food table trying to look incredibly busy because I didn’t know anyone there,” interjects scriptwriter Peter Baynham, who worked with Sarah on Arthur Christmas.
“That feeling of being on the outside looking in never truly goes away, does it? It’s such a universal human emotion, so we knew we had something authentic that was going to endear Barney to the audience.”
Also sure to entice the audience is a stellar voice cast that includes the likes of Zach Galifianakis as Ron, Jack Dylan Grazer as Barney, Ed Helms as Barney’s dad Graham, Olivia Colman as Bulgarian grandmother Donka, and Rob Delaney as manically ambitious executive Andrew Morris.
Jack, for one, can certainly relate to the film’s central theme.
“I remember being the kid in middle school that didn’t have whatever it was that everybody else had and I was the odd one out,” he recalls.
“I think that’s why this project was so attractive to me, and why I am so compelled, because I related so much to Barney – he’s just a beautiful character and he’s so genuine and naive and sweet.”
At just 18, the Californian actor, known for his portrayal of Freddy Freeman in the DC Extended Universe film Shazam!, hasn’t known a life without social media and modern-day tech.
“I was doing interviews with Liam Payne [who voices a character and whose new single Sunshine will feature in the film] yesterday and it’s similar to what he said – that he grew up with it, it was always around. That’s the same for me,” muses the teenager, who boasts 4.3 million followers on Instagram.
“My relationship with social media is, I like to say, strictly business. But of course being the curious cat that I am, I do sometimes want to post stuff. But the majority is business, promotional – or skate videos!”
In contrast, stand-up star-turnedactor Zach, 52, steers clear of it.
“It’s not that I don’t understand it, it just seems very noisy and there seems to be a lot of people disagreeing - and some of those people are robots!” he explains. “There’s just not enough validity in it to me, so I ignore it.”
“I dip in and out of it and I sometimes have had fun with it, but lately it feels just like a lot of people screaming at each other,” adds his Hangover co-star, Ed, 47.
“If I do go down a rabbit hole, I tend to finally put my phone down in a worse mood than I started, so I am kind of thinking maybe
I’ll just drop out entirely.”
“There’s a science to it,” Zach interjects. “There’s dopamine that gets released when you have more followers – this is what social scientists are saying now that they’ve done brain things and it’s like a high, right?
“At first it didn’t seem all bad, it seemed like a really great thing, and the dark side seems to be taking over.”
For the film-makers it was a premise that was always set to start conversation – with Sarah’s own parental fears the very reason she chose a B*Bot as the integral character.
“I think originally I just wanted to turn an iPad into an animated character because the iPad was the thing that was worrying me most as a parent,” confides the Brit, who also co-wrote and exec-produced the feature.
“I was seeing my little girl grow up and become immersed – it’s like your kid goes into this new playground and you can’t go with them and hold their hand, and you don’t know what’s going to happen and if they’re going to get hurt and if they’re going to understand it.
“I thought, this is the most important thing we need to be figuring out and talking to our kids about,” she reasons. “And obviously, when
I pitched it to
Pete, he then helped twist it into comedy.
Like, ‘So yeah, but what if the main character is basically an idiot?”’
But with a young audience and our reliance on technology at an alltime high, it was unrealistic to reject technology in favour of friendship – it’s more about how we use it, say the team,
“We all feel insecure about social media and all these other things – it just has that effect,” Sarah says.
“I want every movie to be a message in a bottle from me to my kid and from other parents to their kids.
“In a way, some of where Ron comes from are the things that I wanted to say to my daughter sitting on her bed at night when she was worried about not having friends, and you want to say, ‘It will be OK, you will find those friends, and just because you don’t have them now doesn’t mean that it’s not coming.’
“That is what drives the emotion of Ron, really: those things that you want your kid to understand so that they don’t go through all the pain and suffering as they grow up.”
“It’s a cautionary tale,” offers Jack. “The overarching message is true connection, and that connection can happen in the most unlikely of
places.”
Lately it feels just like a lot of people screaming at each other...
Ed Helms on social media