Ron's Gone Wrong (2021) on Netflix
PG20211h 46mAdventureAnimationComedy
Barney Pudowski is the only kid in his class without a B-Bot, a robot built to make friends. The damaged one his family brings home does not work like the others.
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- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.1/1046,568 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bubble, a technology company led by Marc Wydell, has released the B-Bot, a walking, talking robot designed to find friends for its owner. In the town of Nonsuch, California, Barney Pudowski is the only pupil in his class without one; his former friends Savannah Meades, Rich Belcher, Noah and Ava have all given themselves over to their B-Bots. On his birthday, his father Graham and his grandmother Donka find the Bubble store closed and take a slightly damaged unit that fell from a delivery van. Barney activates it and finds the robot glitchy, its safety functions disabled, and unlike any other B-Bot in town.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ron's Gone Wrong (2021)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jack Dylan Grazer began voicing Barney in 2017 at age 13 and did not finish until early 2021, aged 18, struggling to keep his prepubescent voice across the years of recording. He was first brought in as a test voice for early animatics, but Sarah Smith kept him, astounded by his emotional range.
- DNEG announced 20%-25% pay cuts for employees earning more than £35,000 a year, blaming COVID-19 business disruption, and 169 staff signed a collective grievance. The cuts were partly reversed, with Locksmith agreeing to a salary top-up and completion bonus for staff on the film, and the union BECTU condemned DNEG for refusing to communicate with it.
- COVID-19 forced the film's animation to be done remotely by crew working from home, and voice acting was recorded in makeshift home setups where blankets were used for soundproofing. Editors also struggled to assemble footage with temporarily out-of-sync audio, which impaired their judgement over edit timing.
- Sarah Smith founded Locksmith Animation to make a film about the impact of the internet on children's relationships and self-esteem, an idea she had while watching Her (2013). She brought Peter Baynham a one-paragraph story about a robot that learns by imitation, and he asked: "what if it was an idiot and it was annoying?"
- Ron's look was inspired by the pixelated interfaces of the MS-DOS operating system and by "stripped-down" computer software. His facial graphics were built to slide all over his body, so that his eyeballs appear between his legs when he is picked up.
- Zach Galifianakis was instructed to perform much of Ron's dialogue in a deadpan voice to convey that the robot is run by an algorithm and is not very emotional. He found it challenging and unusual, saying no director had ever asked him for "less" emotion before.
