By Dominic Preston.
Marvel aren’t content with dominating the live action blockbuster. Thanks to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., miniseries Agent Carter and the upcoming Daredevil and more on Netflix, the company is well on its way to dominating the small screen too. Now, thanks in large part to its new owners Disney, Marvel has a new target: animated kids films. And with their first entrant, Big Hero 6, they’ve certainly made a fantastic start.
The latest output of the animation studio responsible for Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph and the absurdly successful Frozen have put together Big Hero 6, but with this latest film they’re the closest they’ve come yet to rivalling the best of their big sibling studio Pixar. The superhero adventure is the most successful blend of humour, action and pathos that the studio has put out yet, and it’s a hard film to not enjoy.
Set in the colorful near-future city of San Fransokyo, the film centres around plucky tech prodigy Hiro, wasting his skills through illegally betting on his own creations in back-alley ‘bot fights’. At his brother Tadashi’s insistence, Hiro agrees to apply to the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, where Tadashi and friends work on some pretty impressive tech, including the film’s real star: Baymax, the oh-so-huggable inflatable healthcare robot of Tadashi’s own design. After a tragic fire and the emergence of a villain using tech of Hiro’s own design, he, Baymax and the rest of the students don experimental tech and become a rather oddball crime fighting team.
The heart of the film is undoubtedly Baymax, who is both unspeakably adorable, reliably hilarious and a touching symbol of the connection between brothers Hiro and Tadashi. The robot is responsible for both the film’s funniest and most heart rending moments, and expect his merchandise to dominate Disney stores for the foreseeable future. This is perhaps also the film’s greatest weakness however – Baymax is such a fantastic character that the rest of the cast can pale by comparison, particularly surfer-dude Fred, who’s likely to infuriate anyone over the age of 8. When Baymax is on screen, everything seems right in the world, but when he’s missing things can drag slightly.
The film comes complete with requisite messages about love and friendship from the kids’ movie pantheon, and questions of justice and revenge borrowed from the standard superhero film template. Besides those, it also has a surprisingly adult take on grief – rare in a film targeted at kids perhaps – which helps it stand out from the juvenile pack and adds part of the film’s impressive emotional depth.
Big Hero 6 doesn’t quite reach the lofty heights of Pixar’s finest, to which almost all animated films must now be compared, but it’s a cut above the likes of Frozen and Tangled. Baymax alone makes the film well worth a watch as Disney’s cutest and funniest creation in some time – he blows Frozen’s Olaf the Snowman clean out of the water. Perfect for the inner child in all of us.
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