Big Hero 6

Disney Animation Studios follows up their recent princess movie hit Frozen (2013) with the distinctly more boy-oriented picture, Big Hero 6.  The film is the first Disney animated feature to focus on Marvel Comics characters (The Walt Disney Company acquired Marvel in 2009). The story centers on a young orphan robotics prodigy named Hiro, who avenges the death of his big brother Tadashi by upgrading a benign medical robot Tadshi created into a mechanical warrior in the Iron Man/Terminator II mold. Empowered by this whimsical creation, called Baymax, Hiro sets out to transform Tadashi’s group of nerdy friends into a band of high-tech heroes and solve the mystery of his brother’s death.

This is one occasion where I probably would have benefitted from seeing a preview or knowing something about the film before watching it. I had no idea this was a comic book superhero team origin story, so my expectations were not as low as they perhaps should have been. This exhausted genre is, admittedly, not a style of picture I enjoy much, in fact I made a decision last year to stop patronizing comic book movies entirely. But my dislike of its genre isn’t the only reason Big Hero 6 scores only a single star from me. When I go to a Disney animated feature, even if its not one I’m inclined to like, I usually still get swept up in the craftsmanship, originality, and inventiveness of the animators. But Big Hero 6 is the most derivative Disney animated film I’ve ever seen. Not only does it closely resemble Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles, Disney/Marvel’s Iron Man, and James Cameron’s Terminator 2, but nearly every event, plot point, comical gag, and design element seems lifted from another movie: Marvel’s The Avengers, Pixar’s WALL-E, Sam Rami’s Darkman, Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Buster Keaton’s The General, Jake Schreier’s Robot & Frank, John Badham’s Short Circuit, I could go on forever. There are bits lifted directly from The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Charlie Chaplin, and these moments don’t feel like homage, they feel life cribbing. Even the visual motifs and layouts, set in a futuristic, urban hybrid of the high-tech meccas San Francisco and Tokyo, seem generic and uninspired.

Big Hero 6 indulges in my least favorite aspects of contemporary kiddy cinema: Super Hero shenanigans that defy even the most generous, fantasy film grade suspension of disbelief, and an all-powerful child plot in which a kid under 15 has mental abilities and access to technology that is far beyond anything in the adult world. The picture tries to explore emotional themes of loss, self-determination, friendship, and empowerment but I just don’t see how these can resonate in such an ungrounded, limitless world of hyper-make-believe.