Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes
Rating: PG
Director: Don Hall and Chris Williams
Quick Impressions:
We’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long time—though not as much as the little boy sitting next to me. I’m not sure how old he was, but he was sitting in a booster seat and counting down the minutes until the movie started. He even told the server that he’d been waiting for weeks to see this movie. I could hear him gasp in excitement and sigh in disappointment as every successive preview started (and turned out not to be the feature). The short before the film nearly killed him. At the end, he asked in worried confusion—like maybe he’d been tricked—“That wasn’t the movie we came to see, right?” (“Feast” the cartoon short is adorable by the way. Both of our kids loved it.)
We all thought Big Hero 6 was fantastic, too. I’m definitely enjoying Disney animation’s mini-Renaissance. Since John Lassiter got involved, they’ve really been cranking out the hits. I remember how exciting it was as a ten-year-old to get the treat of The Little Mermaid after an entire decade of stuff that was markedly less impressive than The Little Mermaid. (I’m not saying Disney didn’t produce anything good in the 80s, but Don Bluth’s The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and The Land Before Time were all superior to Disney’s releases. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. And surely a child’s opinion of children’s movies should count for something.)
Disney animation is firing on all cylinders right now, and Big Hero 6 is one more in a series of strong feature films. I’d say it has a decent shot of winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film (although it’s far from being the way-way-out-in-frontrunner Frozen was last year).
Our kids thought the movie was fantastic, and they went crazy for the song by Fall Out Boy that played during the end credits. My husband and I liked the song, too (which was fortunate since we heard it over and over again for the rest of the weekend).
The Good:
Big Hero 6 does exposition right. It wastes no time, jumping into compelling scenes of action that not only draw us in, but show us exactly who the principal characters are and what they’re all about.
Not only to we get a chance to see Hiro (voiced by Ryan Potter) in action, but we learn what motivates him and several significant things about his past, all in the first ten minutes of the movie. (He’s an orphan who’s freakishly smart, winningly devious, and completely confused about what to do with his life.) We also learn exactly what makes his big brother Tadashi (voiced by Daniel Henney) tick. (He’s the kind of guy who always does what’s right, and his priority is helping others. Though he’s happy to work within the system, he’s willing to break the rules—even the law—if that’s what he has to do to be there for his little brother.)
What we learn about these brothers in the opening sequence of the film remains true throughout the movie. They’re likeable, well developed characters, and the writing is rewardingly consistent. After watching the opening sequence, we could probably predict most of the characters’ future decisions. This is true not only of Hiro and Tadashi, but also of supporting character, wacky Aunt Cass (charmingly voiced by Maya Rudolph). After just two minutes with the woman, we totally get her, and that’s a good thing because the movie doesn’t have to lose momentum on prolonged introductions. We see this family in action, and their actions reveal their personalities to us immediately. Over time, they may grow (particularly Hiro), but they never do out-of-character things for no reason. They’re quite consistent.
Of course, this type of consistency does make the movie a bit predictable, but it is aimed primarily at children, after all. I’ll take a slightly predictable plot over inconsistently written characters any day.
Visually the movie is beyond appealing. It just looks great. San Fransokyo is beautiful, and every one of the characters has a distinct look and unique body language. (Baymax and the villain are amazing standouts, but even the ordinary human characters all carry themselves in a way that makes them stand apart from the others.)
I also like the rest of Hiro’s team. It’s easy to love the gang from the robotics lab (voiced by T.J. Miller, Jamie Chung, Damon Wayans, Jr., and Genesis Rodriguez). It’s particularly refreshing that we’re told they’re some of the world’s brightest scientific minds and then given evidence to demonstrate that. (I used to get so furious at the old Fantastic Four movies. Those people did not seem like brilliant scientists.)
Big Hero 6 also presents kids with a useful life lesson in a readily digestible way. Hiro almost makes a huge mistake. We watch him, understanding his darker impulses and wondering. Will he give in to his desire for vengeance, or will he take the high road instead? To drive the point home for children, we also get another character whose actions are motivated by the same dark impulses Hiro feels. When this character chooses to give into these dark impulses, the results are not great. Meanwhile, doing the right thing turns out to yield positive results in the end (and guess what, the feelings of vengeance were hasty and misplaced). The object lesson could not possibly be more clear, and yet it doesn’t feel particularly heavy handed. It’s actually quite well done, and if kids miss the point, they must be more into the popcorn than the movie or something.
Best Scene:
My daughter and I have the same favorite scene. She calls it, “the part where Baymax goes walking in the street.”
Scott Adsit (who played Pete on 30 Rock) voices Baymax, and he does a fantastic job. Baymax brings so much warmth and humor to the film, and his line delivery is a big part of that. What really makes the character for me, however, is the way he moves.
I enjoyed the movie up until the scene where Hiro accidentally activates Baymax by saying, “Ouch!” (I particularly like Tadashi and Aunt Cass.) But I absolutely flat out loved the moment when Baymax nonchalantly seeks a solution to Hiro’s problem by focusing intently on the object in his hands and meandering all over town, blissfully unaware of everything that’s not his objective.
If you’ve ever watched anyone get lost in thought and focus so intently on some object of preoccupation that the outside world no longer matters, then this scene should speak to you as much as it did to me.
Baymax just looks adorable, and all around him, the streets of San Fransokyo look pretty great, too.
(Both my kids really love Baymax’s fist bump, too, and have been imitating it often.)
Best Scene Visually:
Hiro’s presentation at the robotics fair is very well staged. Those microbots look so cool, and Hiro displays remarkable showmanship by storing them away from the stage and making them come to him so that every eye is drawn.
The villain of the piece consistently uses the microbots in visually arresting ways, too.
Best Action Sequence:
I like the training montage with the butler the best. I really liked the early scene in the robotics lab, when Tadashi introduces his brother to all of his friends, and Hiro gets to see a brief demonstration of everybody’s projects. But what’s even better is the training montage later, which calls back to this scene and shows us that each scientist’s own project plays a central role in the super suit Hiro designs for that person. That’s very gratifying. It shows that the work of these science students is valuable and that each person’s ideas really do matter. They’re not just superheroes because they find a random cache of space weapons or get mutated by some freak accident. They design the tech they use. Each scientist creates a particular invention, and Hiro finds a way to weaponize it. I think that’s very cool.
The Negatives:
Where is San Fransokyo? Getting Hiro’s origin story is great, but I desperately craved more backstory on the city where he lived. Honestly, it’s such a cool place. The design of the city is so captivating that you feel like you’ve enjoyed a leisurely vacation there by the time the film is over. I’d really love to go there. But where is it?
My husband and I assume that it’s a consolidated metropolis populated by the residents of San Francisco and Tokyo after natural disaster (earthquakes, tidal waves) wiped out those urban centers. Of course, it’s also possible that only one or the other of the cities was destroyed, and in the aftermath, millions of people emigrated from San Francisco to Tokyo or vice versa. (That idea may make slightly more sense given that San Francisco and Tokyo are in different countries.) Then again, maybe there was a massive continental shift, or maybe San Francisco got shaken loose from the continental U.S. and floated all the way across the Pacific to Tokyo. (You can probably tell that I’m not a geologist.)
My stepson has a different theory. Mentioning the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, he suggests that the city is simply either the San Francisco or Tokyo of the future that has created an imitation of the other city within itself. I’m not so sure I buy that idea, but I’m up for a similar theory of San Fransokyo being a community inside San Francisco, like Chinatown but with former residents of Tokyo.
Of course, culture in San Fransokyo seems not too different from the present day here, so it’s also possible that this story is set in some kind of alternate reality.
In the end, we just don’t know. The movie could explain the setting so quickly and easily. (One line of expository dialogue would do it.) But it chooses not to. Some might label that move elegant, but I call it maddening!
I also find it slightly disappointing that a story that begins with such whimsy and charm eventually becomes just another action movie by the end. For me, the beginning of Big Hero 6 was far more compelling that the finish. (My husband liked the way it transitioned into an action movie at the end, though.) By the end, the story is a little by-the-numbers for my personal tastes. (It’s obvious from the start who the villain is, but I don’t mind that so much, since this is movie for children.)
Maybe it’s my imagination, but it also seems like lots of Disney movies borrow from each other thematically lately. It’s like they discover a move that works and then do it over and over again, really punching it and only tweaking it slightly. In the future, it will be pretty easy for film historians to look back and say, “In the 2010’s all movies Disney had anything to do with contained a mix of these elements.”) That’s not necessarily horrible, though.
My only other slight complaint is that the film is called Big Hero 6, which is the name of the team of superheroes that it painstakingly assembles. But in the end, it’s really all about Hiro and his struggles, and the others don’t matter so much. Now granted, I have not read the comic, and the post-credits scene does hint that if there’s a sequel, it may focus more closely on Fred. (But it’s hard to tell if that’s the promise of a sequel or just a late joke.) Maybe this installment focuses on Hiro, but in the future, we’ll get stories with one of the other teammates at the center. I’d be happy to watch more adventures in San Fransokyo.
Overall:
Big Hero 6 boasts compelling characters, quick pacing, a decent story, and gorgeous visuals. It’s got humor and heart, and it even features a surprise cameo to drive home the point that it’s adapted from a Marvel comic.
It’s definitely one of the best animated features of the year, and has a good shot at winning the Oscar, though your kids won’t care about that. They’re much more likely to be into the action, the comedy, the heart, the creepy guy in the kabuki mask, and the adorable inflatable robot. If you’re looking for a movie to see with the whole family, this is definitely the best choice at the box office right now.