Big Hero 6 (2014)

For our awesome movie of today, we turn to Disney's superhero movie, Big Hero 6.

The Movie:

Big Hero 6 is the 54th movie in the Disney Animated Canon.  The movie came about after Disney's acquisition of Marvel, in which they scoured the later's library for little known characters, and the result was Disney's first comic book superhero movie.  Big Hero 6 performed well at the box-office and was well-received by critics and audiences.  It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the second Disney movie to do so (after Frozen the previous year).

Big Hero 6 is based on characters from the comic book created by Man of Action and published by Marvel, but the movie does not tie-in into any other Marvel film and draws only a little from the comic's mythology.  The movie features Hiro Hamada, a 14-year-old tech genius and high school graduate living in the fictional city of San Fransokyo with his older brother Tadashi and their aunt.  Tadashi wants Hiro to find something better to do than participate in illegal robot fights, so he takes Hiro to his lab at San Fransokyo Tech, where he is a student.  There, Hiro meets Tadashi's friends, Gogo, Wasabi, Honey Lemon, and Fred, along with their professor, Robert Callaghan.  Tadashi also shows Hiro his project, a healthcare robot named Baymax.  In order to impress Professor Callaghan and earn a spot at the school, Hiro invents a collection of microbots that can be controlled by a neural transmitter and displays them at an exhibition at the school.  Hiro impresses both Callaghan and industrialist Alistair Krei, who offers to buy the microbots.  However, the bots appear to be lost in an explosion that kills Callaghan and Tadashi.  Several weeks later, a mysterious man with a kabuki mask appears with Hiro's bots, and it is up to Hiro, with the help of Baymax and his friends, to discover who the man is and what he wants.

Big Hero 6 is a fun adventure and an enjoyable movie.  Overall the story plays out like any number of superhero origin movies that have come out in the last couple of decades, buy Big Hero 6 is self-aware enough to reference that fact and lean into the usual comic book tropes.  Like the best of Disney, the movie works not because of its genre, but how it uses the genre to tell a compelling character driven story.  And it helps that the movie looks great too.  Much was made about the upgraded computer technology Disney used to render the city of San Fransokyo, and it definitely payed off with a highly detailed world for this movie.

This movie is not a musical, so most of the music is found in Henry Jackman's score.  Jackman is no stranger to superhero movies, having scored the 2nd and 3rd Captain America films along with X-Men: First Class, and there are some truly great moments in this film, especially in the scene where Hiro and Baymax are flying over the city.  As to be expected with Disney, there is one radio friendly pop song used in this movie, and here that song is Fall Out Boy's "Immortals," used both in movie in the training sequence and over the end credits.  Sometimes these songs can be less than memorable, but "Immortals" is actually a really good song.

And even though Big Hero 6 isn't truly a Marvel movie, we do get both a post-credits scene and a Stan Lee cameo.

Presence in the Parks:

When the movie first came out, Hiro and Baymax both appeared as character meets at the Magic of Disney Animation at Hollywood Studios.  When that attraction closed for the Star Wars Launch Bay, both left.  However, Baymax did return to a regular meet in Epcot's Future World.  His meet location is called Hiro's Workshop and is located in the Innoventions West Building.

As far as a ride goes, nothing is currently in the works in the US, but there is a ride scheduled to open in 2020 at Tokyo Disneyland.  This ride will be a whip ride like the soon-to-be-opened Flying Saucers in Toy Story Land.

Big Hero 6 is a movie that would actually lend itself to a well-themed, fast-paced adventure ride, given the number of great action scenes in the movie.  Hopefully something more will come to the parks in the future.

Interestingly enough, the last time I was at WDW, this was the most recent Disney animated movie, yet I don't recall seeing much promotion of it at all in the park.