Even as big a comics nerd as I am, I had no idea that this was based on a Marvel superhero team. I would have if they had kept the original characters like the Silver Samurai and Sunfire, but after watching this, I’m glad that they changed things around and made it its own thing. I would have skipped this completely as just another Disney adventure cartoon and never known anything about it if it weren’t for excellent word-of-mouth.
It grabbed me right from the get-go when it drops the viewer into the familiar yet strange world of San Fransokyo. As its name implies, it’s a wonderful pastiche of San Francisco, with its American English, sweeping suspension bridge and trams, and Tokyo, with its neon-illuminated kanji billboards, futuristic technology and decorative cats on buildings. Then we zoom in on the back-alley bot-fighting scene and I get a nasty frisson of revulsion at the memory of Real Steel. But when Hiro Hamada and his seemingly harmless bot curb stomps the local bullying champion, it’s impossible not to at least crack a smile. Still, it’s only when we move on to the university and meet Hiro’s brother Tadashi’s friends and their inventions, culminating with Tadashi’s own Baymax, that I’m really won over.
The fortunes of this movie rests entirely on the rotund robot and judging by how prominently he figures in all of the promotional materials, Disney plainly thinks they’ve come up with a winning character. In this instance, they’re absolutely right. The idea of making a huggable, inoffensive robot made of vinyl who twaddles as he moves around is nothing short of brilliant. The best bits of the movie are when Hiro and Baymax bond with each other and Hiro learns that as cool as Baymax is, he’s not much of a fighter. A big part of why he’s so charming is that in the early scenes at least, Hiro saves him as often as he saves Hiro.
The rest of the characters are less substantial, perhaps oddly so because the title Big Hero 6 is supposed to refer to the team as whole. Still, I like them for being a multicultural group of science geeks and I especially enjoyed Wasabi for being the voice of sanity even as they go on to do ever more over-the-top things. They also get extra points from me for the technobabble explanations of their inventions that actually sound more or less plausible.
The movie is actually at its weakest after everyone suits up and goes full-on superhero mode. It’s not bad, just thoroughly conventional, complete with a predictable climax and heroic sacrifice. I’m particularly irked by the groan-worthy use of anime tropes like the team internalizing a lesson first taught by Tadashi to win through. Even the visually spectacular scene of Baymax flying for the first time feels like a rehash of How to Train Your Dragon. At least the relatively simple and straightforward plot avoids any egregious plotholes save for some explanation of what a genius like Hiro could actually hope to learn from college.
Big Hero 6 doesn’t aspire to be anything except family-oriented entertainment but excels in what it does largely thanks to Baymax and the cool world he lives in. I can’t say that I look forward to the sequels however.