Big Hero 6 may seem like the umptieth Disney movie, especially the umptieth digitally animated one. Considering it’s by the team of Frozen, people may expect something along those lines. Nothing could be further from the truth. Big Hero 6 is one of the best things released by Disney since well, quite a while.
This Marvel/Disney collaboration is proof that both companies should work together more often. The film is not only a magnificent feat when it comes to animation, but also has the same kind of imaginative storytelling and feel of adventure that Marvel movies have become famous for in the last decade.
Based on an old, rather obscure Marvel title of the same name, Disney reinvents both story and characters in the fictional, high-tech and futuristic world of San Fransokyo, where traditional Japanese influences are crossed with the best of futurepunk and futuretech. Zeppelins cloud the skies alongside vehicles that have only been dreamed up in sci-fi settings. Japanese battlesuits, monsters and robots go hand in hand with Tokyo-style streets and traditional San Francisco trams.
A lot of criticism has been made on this movie online, one of them being that Disney is stuck on the same character design over and over. Let me tell you something: when you watch the movie, you will see that this critique is entirely unjustified. While the character Honey Lemon may look slightly like Rapunzel in some of the portrait-type promo images, in the movie she is very much an original character.
The characters are well-developed for their part in the movie and are as loveable as the casts of many other Disney movies people have come to love over the years.
Even though the movie is all about science, robotics and superheroes, it has more than enough features to be interesting to those who don’t much care about these topics as it is pretty well-rounded and there is much more to the story than a bunch of students going after a villain.
The only thing that can be said against it is that it is a mite predictable, but, in the end of the day, it is an animated Disney movie, so some measure of predictability is to be expected.
In short, Big Hero 6 is a fantastic piece of cinematography for animation fans of all ages. Fans of sci-fi, futurism, futurepunk and colorful animation in particular will find this movie appealing.
And as this is a Marvel collaboration, yes, there is a Stan Lee cameo, and yes, you really should wait for all the credits to end, because in Marvel tradition there is a last piece of film to come after that.
But I won’t say more, you’ll have to go see and hopefully enjoy this movie as much as I did for yourself.
