One Hero This

In the early years of Disney's acquisition of Marvel, they tried some interesting things, one of the more lukewarm experiments being 2014's Big Hero 6. Both an official entry into the Disney Animated Canon and a Marvel film (though not an MCU film), it's a surprisingly low-key effort, made even moreso following the massively successful Frozen and being released the same year as Captain America: Winter Soldier, one of the best, arguably the best, of the MCU films. But while Big Hero 6 isn't the best of the Disney or Marvel canon, it's a sweet little diversion.

The makers of the film deliberately diverged from the original comic in a number of ways. One significant change was to move the setting from Japan to a fictional San Fransokyo--really, San Francisco but after a massive influx of Japanese culture. It's not a very interesting idea and seems likely born more of the filmmakers' reticence to commit to a fully Japanese setting. Despite this, Big Hero 6 is massively popular in Japan, where it was released under the title of Baymax. Disney has long had an enormous, ubiquitous presence in Japan (boy, is it ever ubiquitous, I can tell you) so it seems only natural that it would be successful. Given this, one might wonder why Disney has never made a film with a straightforward Japanese setting as they did for China with Mulan or the Middle East with Aladdin. I suppose the phantom controversy around "cultural appropriation" in recent years may be part of it but I don't think so. The only one cancelled over Raya and the Last Dragon was Lindsay Ellis and it was for daring to just allude indirectly to the fact that it was appropriation. I suppose I should wait to talk about that when I get to Raya and the Last Dragon, though.

Before superhero films became an institution dominating entertainment media, but a few years after they started to routinely become blockbusters, two different emotional cores of storytelling were developing in the cinematic genre. The most successful were either stories about a genuinely good person managing to save people despite impossible odds (like Raimi's Spider-Man), or they were movies about the ecstasy or consequences of rebelling against society's imperatives (like Nolan's The Dark Knight). Disney had indulged in the latter with Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen and then it aimed for the former with Big Hero 6.

And it succeeds well enough. It is really satisfying watching Hiro (Ryan Potter) and Baymax (Scott Adsit) selflessly using their powers to save the life of a young woman. It is the old Superman story of the superhero saving the damsel in distress and, of course, it can still work perfectly well. Considering the woman's unconscious, it's not a whole lot different from the climax of Sleeping Beauty.

The film's based on a comic series about a team, a team of six--thus the title. The film's Japanese title is much more accurate for the film's story which is definitely focused on Hiro and Baymax--gratuitously. The filmmakers were evidently so worried about letting other characters make contributions that they give all their key decisions to Hiro. Despite the fact that they're supposed to all be tech geniuses, Hiro designs all their costumes and gadgets. In the climactic battle, when the team members are variously trapped, it's Hiro's suggestion that they look at things "from another angle" that gives them all inspiration to find a way to escape. It's overreaching on the screenplay's part, it would have been much more satisfying watching everyone contribute on their own like in a good X-Men or Avengers story.

The original comic had ties to X-Men as it featured the six teaming up with Sunfire, a Japanese mutant who occasionally was counted among the X-Men. This was back before Disney bought 20th Century Studios so maybe that's why he's not in the film. Otherwise, most of the characters are pretty much directly imported from the comics, except effort was made to make Baymax more "huggable". This was a great success and his inflatable body is cute and conducive to a lot of visual comedy.

Disney also changed the design of another team member, Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), to make her oddly skeletal with long, stick-like limbs. I'm not really sure what the thought was behind that but she's still a cute character, probably the one who most resembles a Disney Princess, at least in terms of her perpetually positive personality. Her name makes me think of Cutey Honey, an anime character from the '70s, and I wonder if that was the original inspiration for her. The character of Go Go (Jamie Chung), meanwhile, physically resembles a Disney Princess so much that she almost looks like they put a different wig on Elsa's computer model.

But, like the other team members, she has a pretty tiny role compared to Hiro. In this story, despite the fact that Hiro's a robotics genius who runs a racket building robots for "bot fights", Baymax was actually created by his elder brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney). This addition gives Hiro an internal conflict similar to Raimi's Spider-Man where he has to overcome a desire for revenge to accept heroic responsibility. By the end of the movie, it works well enough, though Baymax's cuteness definitely steals the show.

Big Hero 6 is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck-It Ralph
Frozen