Oscar Nominations
Best Animated Feature
Big Hero 6 wasn’t
a film that made me want to rush out to the theater and demand they take my
money. I didn’t think it was going to be
bad or anything, but it looked like it was probably going to be a watered-down
kid-targeted version of what I liked about what Marvel Studios puts out. And, to a certain extent, I was right. However, just because a film is targeted at
kids does not make it in any way inferior; I just recognize that I’m not the
target audience. And while the film is
good, I feel that it suffers from a misconception about kids as moviegoers that
keeps it from reaching its full potential as a narrative.
For the two people who aren’t aware of what this film is
about, the story takes place in San Fransokyo, a near-future mash-up of two
obvious cities. Our protagonist is Hiro,
who over the course of the first act loses a close family member and ends up
suffering depression because of it.
Enter Baymax, a robotic assistant designed to provide medical treatment. Baymax begins assisting Hiro in finding a masked
thief of some stolen technology that was taken in the incident that killed his
lost family member, operating under the conception that doing so will help
treat Hiro’s emotional distress.
Eventually, the film goes full-on superhero flick, with Baymax gaining
upgrades and Hiro assembling a team of tech-powered friends, called the Big
Hero 6, to take down the mysterious thief.
Despite the film’s title, the real heart of this story is in
Hiro’s emotional recovery from his loss, and a good half of the film is devoted
to just him and Baymax working through the stages of grief, albeit in exciting,
action-oriented and comedic ways. Hiro
is a kid genius who has never before encountered a problem he can’t solve, but
his depression becomes the ultimate roadblock that he eventually acknowledges
he needs help overcoming, which leads to a heartfelt and interesting dynamic
with Baymax. Baymax really steals the
show as the comedic center, speaking in blunt, literalist program speak that
paints him as more of a sophisticated Siri than something akin to the emotion-driven Wall-E. This is perhaps the most realistic
interpretation of what future AI will appear as in the coming years, and though
Baymax clearly isn’t a person as one would normally define the term, there’s
something oddly endearing about his absolute courtesy and misunderstandings of
colloquialisms.
However, I think the film’s primary weakness comes from how
the film gives short-shrift to the remaining four members of the Big Hero 6,
who really don’t play a large part in the film until the second half. They are all interesting variants on nerd,
geek, and dork archetypes, and all of them develop unique technical gadgets to
reflect those personalities, but the film doesn’t devote enough screentime to
allow us to get to know them. This is
because the film is only ninety minutes long, when the amount of story to tell
and character depth to explore could have easy filled an entire two hours. The result is a rushed third act, and while
it does resolve all of the film’s running plot threads, it feels like a lot of
slower character moments were sacrificed in the name of an artificial
limitation born from the conception that children have too short an attention
span for anything longer.
That said, if my primary complaint with a film is that I
wish there were more, you probably can’t go too wrong. This is obviously meant to be the first
installment in some sort of franchise, whether in films or a television show,
and I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open to see the path it takes. Most theaters have stopped playing it by now,
and most people who wanted to see it probably have, but if you’ve been on the
fence, Big Hero 6 is good enough to
get you off it.
What’s your favorite film from Disney’s recent animated
renaissance? Leave your thoughts in the
comments below.
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