There's a lot of love out there for this movie, so I'll sound merely grumpy when I record that I liked it, but didn't love it. The Japamerican design work is certainly cool; and there are some laugh-aloud moments (I laughed, out loud!) in the middle portion, all of them associated with the Baymax character, and the loudest laughs in my corner of the cinema provoked by a sequence where low battery power renders the medical robot, in effect, drunk. Ah, but. But: I thought the throughline story weak, the moral Bildungsfilm of 14-year-old protagonist Hiro Hamada abrupt to the point of jerkiness (in his anger he reprograms his robot to kill the villain! Then he instantly realises the ethical delinquency of this action, and changes back! That's it!) and unconvincing, and the action sequences weirdly uninvolving. But that's just me. Everyone else loves it. You will too.
And to double-down on my grumpiness by adding-in spoilers. So the 'villain' is driven to villainy by the fact that his daughter has vanished into the weird dimension between the two matter transporter portals. He's reputedly the world's smartest scientist, yet he decides to don a kabuki mask and terrorise the city rather than, let's say, look for a way to retrieve his daughter? We assume from the cues the movie provides that he's been involved in developing said portals, and he's for instance able to resurrect one and set it to destroy a university: but it doesn't occur to him to at least take a peek inside? In a related grump: are we to assume that the Baymax floating inside the mystery dimension, having gifted its green 'good' programme chip back to Hiro, is left only with its kill!-kill!-kill! karate red chip inside it? So that's a killer evil Baymax floating through the mystery dimension to ... wait, really? And here's a more personal snark: in the movie's big car chase sequence, humour is generated by the fact that the driver of the car in which our heroes are fleeing the bad guy is an obsessive-compulsive neat-oid type, who stops at the red lights despite the imminent peril behind him and so on. I, the author of this very post, put exactly that scenario into the central car chase of this novel, published some years ago. I daresay the film-makers never read that particular book. I daresay.
Not just personal grump, though, I think: too much of this movie felt second hand, in a tired way. Hiro flies Baymax through the clouds whooping with delight, and it's all a bit How To Train Your Dragon. Other bits strike too The Incredibles, or Wall-E, or Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs vibes. But, never mind what I say. The film has enjoyed the second-best opening weekend, in terms of gross, of any Disney animation, behind only the juggernaut that is Frozen. So you'll probably love it.
Me, I've just spent a happy couple of minutes saying "я люблю тебя" and listening to myself saying it. And yes, it really does sound like that. Cool.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated Big Hero 6 as a film about processing grief (the villain's failure to consider that his daughter might have survived her accident is clearly necessary to that theme, since without it he couldn't embody the "bad" response to that loss), but I agree that it can get a little schematic on that front. The comparison that seems most obvious to me is Up, another film about working one's way through incalculable loss by allowing yourself to love other people, and certainly that comparison isn't kind to BH6. Still, I appreciate a film - and particularly a superhero film - whose message is that friendship and compassion are more powerful tools in dealing with tragedy than superpowered revenge.
ReplyDeletePhil: :-)
ReplyDeleteAbigail: well, I can't argue with your emotional response. I can only note that UP moved me intensely where BIG HERO 6 just ... didn't. I certainly grok the 'friendship and compassion' moral: but Hiro's friends are kind of parachuted into the narrative, and positioned around him in a way I found hard to credit (why is he the de factor 'leader' of the gang? He's a kid: you're saying it didn't strike you that the Gogo Tomaro character wouldn't be the natural main player here? Though of course, as a woman, she can't occupy that role narratively speaking ...) Which is to say: the 'friendship' moral seemed to me told rather than shown.