We All Need Another Hero

Rating: 6/10 (10 November 2014)

This film is mildly recommended. ☆☆ ½
Disney and Marvel have joined forces to beget Big Hero 6, a computer animated film about a boy and his pet robot. They have created wondrous worlds and interesting enough characters only to place them in the most mundane plot. The film starts off promisingly with plenty of awe and joy but finally dissipate into one action chase sequence after the next. Now this may sell toys and merchandise at a hefty profit but the cost of their own creative ingenuity and soul is the price paid.
Most animated features nowadays feed into the video game frenzy with its loud aggressive action and pop spectacle sacrificing fully developed characters and the remains of a plot for large screen destruction. Big Hero 6 is once again that type of film showcase. As in the past, just like other well-crafted predecessors (Wall-e, Brave, Frozen, Cars, and Planes, for example), this film is wildly (and unevenly) entertaining before it falls victim to this malady. (Some animated films like Ratatouille, Up, The Incredibles, and the Toy Story franchise have successfully sidestepped these pitfalls with stronger and more cohesive scripts with a satirical bent.)
In Big Hero 6, we are somewhere in the future, in SanFransokyo to be more precise, a mash-up of both metropolises. Living there is our main human character, a teenage gamer and bot fighter named Hiro. Hiro is an intelligent but aimless computer geek, unlike his big brother Tadashi who is a robotic whiz and has created a cutting edge robot named Baymax. After tragedy befalls Hiro, he is forced to join forces with Tadashi's lab mates and battle an evil mastermind. (Parents, be forewarned that on a scale from 1 to 10, the emotionally scarring damage of this sad event to your child psyche could fall midway between Bambi's mother's demise as 1 and the traumatic killing of Old Yeller as a 10.)
The moviegoer is taken on a diverting journey, but it's one that never lives up to its clever beginnings. Big Hero 6 doesn't achieve its true potential when the end nears. It wears itself out with too many well-staged but dramatically inert chase scenes. The results are predictable and so formulaic. The film reads like a rejected X-Men comic, far too simplistic in structure and pacing.
Literally, the heart of the film is the lovable and huggable Baymax, the most distinctive character in the entire film. The animators have done wonderful things with him, from his sluggish movements, sound design and his rubbery latex exoskeleton. All of the others in the film pale by comparison. In fact, the characters, as drawn, lack any real presence. However, kudos go out to the detailed and creative background designs of San Fransokyo which show a lot more imagination than this woebegone script. (Surprisingly, six writers are credited with this lame story and its semi-plot that is more concerned with action than characters.)
Big Hero 6 is strictly a heroes vs. villain by-the-comic-book affair. It could have been so much more rewarding if it would have just focused on the relationship between Hiro and Baymax and their bonding instead of veering uncontrollably off-course for the sake of action. As it is, the film is still visually strong and has some charming humorous moments, mostly due to our walking marshmallow of a hero's fish-out-of-water existence. However, Baymax will make a nice expensive toy for parents to buy this Christmas...a win-win strategy for Disney/Marvel, but a win-lose situation for the more sophisticated lovers of film animation. GRADE: B-
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