Short Round: Big Hero 6 (2014) ***/*****
Disney Animation’s recent delving into video game-themed adventure, Wreck-It Ralph, proved that they’re a studio who could step outside of their princess roots and make animated movies that appeal to both boys and girls alike. And Marvel, the super hero factory who they teamed up with to make this movie, Big Hero 6, are the last people who need to have their credentials once again listed. In theory, Big Hero 6 looked like it represented the perfect marriage of content and creators — a surefire home run if there ever was one. In practice, however, it doesn’t quite manage to get there. If we’re going to stick with baseball metaphors, we’ll call it a solid double.
Big Hero 6 is a loosely adapted big screen version of an original Marvel comic that told the tale of the forming of a team of Japanese superheroes. This being mainstream Hollywood moviemaking though, we’re not getting the stories of Japanese-speaking people this time around. Instead, the film has created the city of San Fransokyo as it’s setting — an immersive metropolis that mixes San Francisco with Asian iconography and then pumps itself full of visual steroids. The story told is that of a troubled young genius named Hiro (Ryan Potter) and his loyal and lovable robot Baymax (Scott Adsit), who outfit a team of science-obsessed grad students with high tech weaponry in an effort to solve the mystery around and avenge the death of Hiro’s older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), and inadvertently create the world’s newest team of superheroes in the process.
Big Hero 6 is a solid film, the kind that is likely to be enjoyed quite a bit by children, but, in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t bring anything to the table that would allow it to stand out from the rest of the animated pack. It’s frequently amusing, but never legitimately funny. It’s packed full of action, but it’s never legitimately thrilling. And, most of all, the things that it does manage to do well are things that too closely resemble aspects of other movies that already did them better. The Iron Giant did the boy and his robot story better. The Incredibles did animated superhero adventure better. Things like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or ParaNorman told the story of the sensitive and intellectual outsider better. Big Hero 6 never makes any major missteps, but in a world that’s so inundated with great animated family films as well as great superhero adventure movies, it needed to find a more unique angle to attack these storytelling forms from in order to not feel like such an also-ran. Baymax is cuddly and cute, but not enough to support an entire feature.
