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Big Hero 6’s
considerable graces as an animated film its fantastical layouts and bouncy
sense of figure and motion—are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate
superhero flick. The movie is imaginative in its handling of Baymax its
Miyazakian balloon-man, often seen looming over a runty teenage boy’s shoulder
or struggling to squeeze past furniture and its Japanese-American near-future
setting, and derivative in most other respects. Ultimately, it sacrifices
something unique and poignant in favor of the kind of loud, instantly
forgettable team-effort showdown familiar from countless live-action Marvel
movies of the past decade.
That’s a shame, because Baymax an inflatable medical robot
designed by a college student, and left in the care of his whiz-kid brother is
such a terrific image of both other worldliness and gentleness, a figure without
angles, barely able to get through a doorway, guided by pure, programmed
selflessness. In the age of computer animation, which is increasingly concerned
with applying realistic textures and physics to non-realistic figures, the
smooth white Baymax seems like a throwback to the playfulness of hand-drawn
animation, his shape and movements continually distorted. Voiced by Scott Adsit
with a mixture of naiveté and deep-seated caring, Baymax acts like a visitor
from another, more generous world the world of technological promise.
Big
Hero 6 is set in San
Fransokyo, an imaginary hybrid city with San Francisco’s geography and Tokyo’s
architecture, whereBlade Runner-style
airships crisscross the sky and remote-controlled robots duke it out in
back-alley betting parlors. Here, 14-year-old orphan Hiro (voiced by Ryan
Potter) enlists Baymax in his search for a kabuki-masked villain who is
wreaking havoc using an army of nanobots based on one of Hiro’s designs. There
is something elegant in the idea of pitting Baymax, bumbling symbol of
altruistic science, against a dangerous and misused technology, and there’s
more than a hint of poignancy in the fact that Baymax is aiding Hiro because he
is his “patient,” believing that spending time with friends (i.e. assembling a
superhero team) and going on adventures will help the boy deal with unresolved
grief.
But once the team laser-wielding neat-freak Wasabi (Damon Wayans
Jr.), high-tech chemist Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), disc-throwing
speed-skater Go Go (Jamie Chung), and kaiju-obsessed freegan stoner Fred (T.J.
Miller) comes together, and Hiro outfits Baymax with a rocket-powered
exoskeleton, the movie loses sight of all the things that made it special. When
Hiro and Baymax his body deflated and his speech slurred because of a low
battery sneak around the house where Hiro lives with his aunt, Cass (Maya
Rudolph), they register as characters; blasting away at the bad guy while
dressed in brightly colored, reflective armor, they seem like little more than
a couple of generic costumes doing battle with a hackneyed trope.