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| Directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams Written by Don Hall, Daniel Gerson, and Jordan Roberts |
This weekend has two very different films competing to win the box office, Interstellar, a hard SF epic drama from Christopher Nolan, and Big Hero 6, an animated family movie from Disney that is also a superhero movie. Aesthetically, they couldn't be more different, but thematically they both share an admiration of science and engineering as a force for good. I'm not going to say which is better, honestly that would probably require a bit of hindsight, but both are fine productions and Big Hero 6 is on par with The Incredibles as a good family superhero adventure.
Big Hero 6 is the first, and probably not last, animated production from Disney to be based on a Marvel Comics property, but its source material is so obscure, and the adaptation more or less just took the title and little else, that it doesn't matter, and Disney has downplayed the connection in marketing.
Our story concerns one Hiro Hamada, a teenage robotics enthusiast living in the futuristic mega city of San Fransokyo, which as it's name would suggest, is what it would look like if San Francisco was designed and built in the Far East, who's fast track to early college is interrupted when his older brother Tadashi dies in a fire at a robotics convention. This sends him into a grieving self seclusion that is pretty heavy stuff for a kids movie.
Hiro suspects that the fire wasn't an accident, but was actually part of a sinister plot by a mysterious super-villain using super science nanomachines stolen from him. He decides to track him down, and to do this he conscripts the aid of Baymax, an inflatable healthcare assistant that he retrofits into a combat bot. Baymax goes along with this because it fits in with its programming to "heal the sick and injured", and Hiro claims that getting revenge will help his emotional state. Also helping, connecting with his brother's friends from college Wasabi, GoGo Tamago, Honey Lemon, and Fred while enlisting them to use their various scientific fields to become the Big Hero 6 of the title and take down the bad guy.
The characters are all fantastic and come across as immensely likable, with the obvious standout being Baymax, and the assembled voice cast does a wonderful job. Ryan Potter finds a line between obnoxious and charming as Hiro, T.J Miller is clearly having a good time playing laid back slacker Fred, Jamie Chung brings real energy into GoGo's tomboy routine, Damon Waynes Jr. fills the role of the neurotic, OCD-ish Wasabi really well to great comic effect, Génesis Rodriguez brings real life into Honey's familiar nerd girl performance and stops it from becoming a caricature, but the standout is, of course, Scott Asdit as Baymax.
Baymax, besides being a great character design, is a fantastic depiction of how user friendly AI actually functions. There is never any indication of Baymax gaining a soul or becoming more like a human, instead the reason he is so likable, and will probably sell all of the toys, is that his programming is so responsive that people, including the audience, can project humanity onto him.
Unfortunately, they did such a good job setting up these characters, and devoting time to the same, that the film goes by much too quickly. Blame it on the conception that children won't sit through a movie if it runs longer than an hour and a half. The writers clearly felt that Hiro rising out of his grieving was the heart of the movie, and it is, and since being able to ask his friends for help is a big milestone in doing so, by the time that happens the movie is already halfway over. Meaning that the business of putting the team together, establishing their powers, and going after the bad guy - who at first seems easy to guess the identity of but then things go in an unexpected direction - is delegated to the last forty five minutes, which makes those proceedings feel more than a bit rushed.
They're clearly meaning to start a series, and it's winning the box office which means it will, so we'll probably get more of the team interacting in the sequels, but they did such a good job setting up dynamics between them in this movie that I wanted to see a bit more of that, but what's here is more than satisfactory, and once we do get to the superhero business it's all beautifully animated and filled with creative energy.
Big Hero 6 is a damn good superhero movie, animated or otherwise, a fantastic family movie, and another solid entry in what I am now calling the Second Disney Renaissance.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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