Big Hero 6
Rated PG ('splosions, death)
Directed by: Don Hall and Chris Williams
Written
by: Jordan Roberts and Don Hall (story), Jordan Roberts, Daniel Gerson and Robert L. Baird (Screenplay), Man of Action (concept and characters)
*** out of ****
Cute.
That's how I would describe this 'un.
Cute.
It's not a knock against it at all. It's a good family flick, it is superbly paced, it has just the right amount of drama (it's not a Pixar flick, so you probably won't cry (not like I ever have at a Pixar movie))... It's... It's cute. It plays it safe.
Big Hero 6 is loosely based on a comic of the same name that I'm not familiar with. It's a Marvel movie, but not part of the MCU. So, you don't have to worry about figuring out if that thing you saw out of the corner of your eye was a reference to Thanos. The premise is this: Hiro (ha!), the protagonist (but not Hiro Protagonist), is a genius. He makes and fights robots as a hobby. His older brother goes to school to study robotics with his nerd friends with clever nicknames (Wasabi, GoGo, Honey Lemon and Fred). Hiro develops microbots that act as a swarm after being inspired by seeing what his brother did: making a medical robot named Baymax. Baymax is inflatable vinyl around a carbon fiber core, and can diagnose and treat pretty much any physical ailment. He helps. The microbots could help, swarming to transport things, build things, what have you. Disaster strikes, the microbots are used for EVIL, and the adventure begins.
I'm not 8, but, if I were, I'd be WAY down with this movie. I'd be down harder for this than I was for Short Circuit. I think that this will age FAR better than that did.
Characters, story, it's nothing that you haven't seen before (not that that's a bad thing, mind you). It's not Iron Giant, but doesn't try to be. It's not the gleeful exercises that The Goonies or The Adventures of Tin-Tin were, and that's OK, too. It's OK to be small sometimes. Leave some room for the sequels.
As far as I am concerned, Pixar is the gold standard for computer animation. What they do is simply phenomenal from a technical standpoint. Disney owns Pixar, but this is not a Pixar movie, although some of the work is stunning.
Watch some of the virtual camera work. Very nice things done with "lenses". Especially watch the swarms in action. I don't know how many polygons they were pushing, but the way they moved was fascinating, especially when other actors were in the frame. Very herky-jerky stop-motion, which is, I suspect, how they would actually move in reality.
It's not the triumph that The Lego Movie was, but it's far from a disaster. If you are a fan of animation as an art form, you should definitely see it. Great work with translucency and texturing.
