Movie Review: ‘Big Hero 6’
The Times critic Manohla Dargis reviews “Big Hero 6.”
Video by Robin Lindsay on Publish Date November 7, 2014. Photo by Walt Disney Pictures.Have the Walt Disney and Pixar animation studios become Walt Pixar, or maybe Wixar or Dixar? It’s getting hard to tell these once-distinct siblings apart. Disney’s latest animated feature, “Big Hero 6,” is a bright, visually sumptuous 3-D computer-animated feature that gives you a bit of an emotional workout. It doesn’t have some of the familiar Disney markers: There are no eardrum-busting anthems or warbling critters, and it isn’t a fairy tale, exactly, mostly because it’s about a boy. It’s a Disney superhero movie with a story from a Marvel comic book, if one rendered with the wit and texture often associated with Pixar, which I guess makes it a Walt Pixar Marvel.
That’s certainly a good way to think of Baymax, the big, beautiful, bouncy white robot who toddles, waddles, squeaks and rather more prosaically flies through “Big Hero 6.” As voiced by Scott Adsit (from “30 Rock”), Baymax has a soothing, comforting voice that at first brings to mind the far more creepily insinuating one of HAL 9000, the computer villain from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But Baymax, much like the movie itself, represents technological optimism at its shiniest and most reassuring. The robot has been created as a “health care companion,” which means that he’s either a furtive endorsement of Obamacare or a criticism of the same, though he’s probably just a futuristic Florence Nightingale that looks like a cuddlier, more streamlined Michelin Man.
Directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, “Big Hero 6” opens with a borderline-frenetic action sequence that announces its tone and PG-rated turf with swaggering humor, signaling that this is no once-upon-a time kiddie kingdom. In a dark corner of the whimsically named city of San Fransokyo (it is a small world), a rowdy crowd has gathered for illegal fights in which remote-controlled robot combatants square off. Here, amid cheers, swooping visuals and the score’s pounding beats, the 14-year-old prodigy Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) makes like a seasoned hustler with a shark smile and a robot annihilator, a triumph that leads to a getaway, a failed race to the rescue and a stint in jail.
Once Hiro has been sprung from jail by his Aunt Cass (Maya Rudolph), the story pieces begin sliding into place. Hiro and his older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), live with Cass above her San Fran-cool bakery and cafe. She’s a disappointingly bland maternal creation, by turns screechy and huggy, and Tadashi isn’t much better, even if he’s a hunky brainiac who studies at an institute of higher nerdiness alongside a Scooby Doo-like posse: a slacker, Fred (a funny T. J. Miller); a tough chick, GoGo (Jamie Chung); a priss, Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez); and a dude with dreads, Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.). The group is as harmoniously balanced as a university diversity committee, and largely distinguished by safe quirks of personality rather than stereotypes and unfunny accents.
Clip: ‘Big Hero Six’
A scene from the film.
Video by Disney on Publish Date October 30, 2014. Photo by Walt Disney Pictures.The designs for these characters are gently exaggerated, with innocuous looks to go with their friendly, unthreatening temperaments. They pale next to Baymax, whose pleasing plumpness and symphony of cartoon sounds — when he walks, his legs produce muffled boing-boing noises — make him the embodiment of kawaii and the Japanese culture of cute. Created by Tadashi, the robot is a palpably tactile and charming screen presence who in time becomes Hiro’s supersize Jiminy Cricket, part folk philosopher, part moral compass. What makes Baymax so memorable and emotionally potent is that he’s also something of a Proustian Marshmallow who triggers an irresistible chain of elemental pleasures: He’s a stuffed animal, a warm blanket, a cozy chair, a warm embrace.
Both Baymax and the backgrounds, with their amusing excesses and startling photorealistic detail, make the story seem fairly superfluous, at least until you’ve settled in. Like the portmanteau name San Fransokyo, the movie fuses different source materials, drawing on diverse cultural traditions, urban landscapes, architectural visions and futurist ideas.
There are waving good-luck cats, airborne wind turbines that suggest why the air looks so clean and a Golden Gate-like bridge with towers that look like vertically stacked Japanese red gates. Before all the story stuff gets in the way, “Big Hero 6” hums along on the imaginativeness of its visual design and the image of a big squeaky toy navigating city streets with Oliver Hardy roly-polyness and the deadpan of Buster Keaton.
Hiro’s journey is rather more pedestrian, resembling that of the classic hero — the writers are Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson and Jordan Roberts — retrofitted to the information age with some space-age filler. Hiro is called to adventure only to refuse that call and then, after receiving help from a magical helper, or rather Baymax, crosses the threshold, enters the belly of the beast and so on. More specifically, a tragedy radically upends Hiro’s world, putting the kibosh on his plans to attend the university and plunging him into a very sad place. He emerges almost by accident when he stumbles across a villain, a discovery that sets him and the story down a path that’s so well-trod it feels discouragingly inescapable: that of the genius turned superhero.
It’s too bad that in making its first movie based on a Marvel comic Disney didn’t decide to take a real leap into the future, say, by making Hiro a girl or ditching some of the clichés, like the blowout finale, that make so many superhero movies feel so drearily similar. “Big Hero 6” is good enough to transcend its blah ending and to make the case that every superhero story should be entirely animated. Given the amount of computer-generated imagery in live action superhero movies, why not? Only that for its next comic-book adventure Disney should think about hiring Linda Woolverton, who helped bring its fairy-tale factory into the 21st century with “Maleficent” and might be able to shake things up for its superheroes. Boy characters deserve paradigm shifts, too.
“Big Hero 6” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The movie features a death and several fight sequences.