A lonely boy and a sparky bot team up for in a tender film that dials up the charm but swerves the big-tech questions
Screenwriters Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith have programmed this watchable if very derivative animated movie about a lonely, bullied kid’s malfunctioning robot best friend: a cheeky tech spin on ET, with some borrowings from the Disney feature Big Hero 6 and the Pixar meisterwerk Wall-E. It’s entertaining, though composed with algorithmic precision, and it winds up suspiciously neutral about whether kids really should abandon digital enslavement in favour of real-life human friends.
Barney (voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer) is from a poor Bulgarian-immigrant family in small-town America. His dad, Graham (Ed Helms), is a sad widower, scraping a living selling novelties over the web, and his comedy Borat-gran Donka (Olivia Colman) keeps goats and chickens. Barney is deeply ashamed of his poverty, his asthma and his failure to fit in: he is regularly forced to sit on the school’s “buddy bench” during recess by the well-meaning teacher, begging for people to hang out with him.