The latest Disney movie is more than just the animation giant’s first superhero feature.
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There's plenty of Pixar to it.
Big Hero 6, which is directed by Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt), is the product of the ruthlessly calculated mating of two giant brands — Marvel, owners of the comic book superhero team on which the movie's loosely based, and Walt Disney Animation Studios, Disney's flagship of animated features going back to 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
But in spirit, it owes just as much to Pixar, the other animation studio that executive producer John Lasseter oversees, and that isn't releasing a film this year.
Big Hero 6 is a children's film, but it's one in which death is a real presence. It's more emotionally sophisticated, dealing with themes of grief and finding your place in the world that are more grounded than the high-flying adventures they're surrounded by would have you expect. It recalls, at times, Monsters, Inc., as well as Pixar's own superhero movie The Incredibles, and there's a touch of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon and Brad Bird's The Iron Giant to it as well. It's not on the level of Pixar at its best — its superhero origin story is by the book and does nothing unexpected — but the central relationship between its 14-year-old protagonist Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) and the robot Baymax (Scott Adsit) definitely shares the right kind of endearing weirdness and surprising resonance.
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It's set in a city that's a hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo.
San Fransokyo is a cleverly conceived and gorgeously realized fantasy metropolis filled with alternate universe versions of familiar San Francisco landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge (now shaped like torii), Coit Tower, and the Transamerica Pyramid. It's got cable cars as well as elevated trains, Victorian houses, and Japanese signage. It's San Francisco, but it's also denser, taller, and more neon, with koinobori-inspired wind turbines flying high above the city like kites and presumably generating power, a magically mashed-up place.
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Its hero, Hiro, is biracial.
And as far as I can figure, he's Disney's first multiracial main character — he and his older brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) are half-white and half-Japanese, and are both voiced by hapa actors. While the Mouse House has offered up protagonists of color before, like Mulan, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Tiana, Big Hero 6 offers Disney's most diverse slate of characters to date, and its most contemporarily diverse world. It may be Japan-inflected, but its setting is thrillingly and matter-of-factly multiracial, both in terms of the characters and the actors voicing them, including Jamie Chung, Damon Wayans Jr., and Génesis Rodríguez.
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