#A Messy Animated Tech Fantasy

“Ron’s Gone Wrong” cannot quite get a handle on its own opinion of technology as represented by the B-Bots, which are both incredibly cutting-edge and also surprisingly easy to break. The cause of Ron’s malfunction is as simple as falling out of a vehicle that stops short on a surface street, the kind of screw-up that you’d think a tech company would have tried to handle.

 It may well be foolish to demand realistic parameters set up in place by a film that, at one point, features one character demanding that another take him to the Bubble cloud. That demand, to note, is meant sincerely and taken as such. But “Ron’s Gone Wrong” intends to take place in a very realistic facsimile of our world, with tweens obsessed with gaming, outlandish pranks, and getting as many likes and views as possible. The notion of a B-Bot is at once both disturbingly believable and truly heinous. There are a few moments during the film where the script approaches acknowledging how empty and hollow a “friendship” with a robot that simply mirrors your own likes and dislikes would be, and how gross it is that a walking, talking robot would mine your data to get you to buy stuff.

But there is a strange naivete at the center of “Ron’s Gone Wrong,” in which the villain of the film isn’t the entire Bubble corporation that foists B-Bots on the world without so much as wondering if everyone needs or wants one. Instead, it’s one specific Bubble higher-up (voiced by comedian Rob Delaney, and designed to look somewhat like Steve Jobs or Tim Cook) who sees the B-Bots for what they really are: profit-grabbing machines. 

It’s not that this character’s viewpoint is sympathetic, considering that he crescendos one monologue by spitting out, “I hate kids!” It’s that everyone else at Bubble is and seems to think that true friendship can best be summarized as that of a boy and his robot, and that a tech company using devices to track people’s information is so wrong as to be unthinkable, which implies an ignorance of real-world concerns. There are plenty of stories of a boy making deep personal connections with non-human characters (think of “E.T.”), but it’s downright weird to watch “Ron’s Gone Wrong” argue that making digital friends can be just as valuable as making flesh-and-blood pals. It’s not that B-Bots are bad technology, in this movie’s view, but that they just need a bit more personality.

“Ron’s Gone Wrong” is frustrating for this and other reasons. The film is the first from Locksmith Animation, and it’s good that there’s a new original animated film coming slightly outside of the big corporations. (“Slightly” here is most apt since the film is released by 20th Century Studios … or, in short, Disney.) Galifianakis is especially funny as Ron, and he and Grazer both sell the key relationship as best they can. The character design recalls some of the past Aardman Animation films, including the CGI “Arthur Christmas” (on which Smith worked), too. 

But as “Ron’s Gone Wrong” careens towards an overlong climax past its expiration date, it is unable to grasp its own unwieldy warning of the proliferation of technology. A few years ago, a movie like this might have ended with the main character putting down his tech and going outside with real kids. This one ends with the kids and robots still hanging out harmoniously, an unintentionally sad commentary on how friendships have morphed so far beyond repair. “Ron’s Gone Wrong” is offering a more dire state of technological affairs than it realizes or wants to.

/Film Rating: 5 out of 10