Let’s be honest: most comic-book movies today are not aimed at kids. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are far too terrifying for the average 12-year-old, while Marvel fare deals in death and destruction on an epic scale. All of which means that superhero movies will soon be incapable of addressing the youthful target audience these films, and their comic-book counterparts, were once aimed at.
In Big Hero 6, Disney Animation Studios appears to have found the solution. It takes a quirky, ferociously detailed and stylised approach, reminiscent of the best work by sister studio Pixar, to create a film that is aimed at kids but which grownups – and the all-important 30-something fanboy blogger demographic – will also adore.
Loosely based on a little-known Japanophile Marvel Comics title from the late 90s, Chris Williams and Don Hall’s movie – previewed for press and bloggers in London on Wednesday – is the happy result of partnership between the rights owners of Iron Man, The Avengers et al and Disney. Yet Marvel Studios had very little to do with the actual making of Big Hero 6. If I’m right, this marks the beginning of a new way forward for comic-book movies.
The story centres on a 14-year-old boy, Hiro, and his relationship with a warm-hearted robot in the futuristic metropolis of Sanfransokyo (try getting your mouth around that portmanteau). Through a series of unexpected events, the young genius finds himself inspiring a team of Iron Man-style robo-suited heroes, whose aim is to take revenge on a mysterious masked villain for the death of a loved one.
If it sounds suspiciously formulaic, the gaps between the action where Big Hero 6 prove its mettle, and Hiro’s relationship with the inflatable Baymax provides some splendid comic moments. The matronly robot had been designed to take care of humans, but Hiro quickly retools it as a martial-arts expert and programmes it to take down the bad guys in scenes that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the “I know kung fu” phrase from The Matrix. If the Wachowskis had cast a walking, talking robo-teddy bear as Neo instead of Keanu Reeves, they might have produced a similar dynamic.
This balance of warmth and Hiro’s video game-style tinkerings sits at the heart of the movie. Our hero and his older brother, Tadashi, attend a fictional higher-education institute dedicated to advancing robot technology. And while I’m sure Bunsen burners and experiments with rotten-egg smells aren’t much of an introduction to building robo-suited superhero teams, the message of film-makers is so sincere that any cynicism quickly evaporates.
“We wanted to make [the characters] aspirational,” producer Roy Conli told me. “The structure of the story led into that, and there’s this whole kind of maker culture happening right now. The idea is that Hiro and his friends are really smart, really active, and they use their intelligence to create.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3biFxZIJOQ
Conli said the film-makers deliberately picked an obscure comic book to adapt to film. “This was always going to be a Disney movie, and we certainly couldn’t grab any of the Marvel properties that are being filmed now,” he said. “Finding something off to the side gave us complete freedom. The original comic book was set in Tokyo, and we’ve made it San Fransokyo; Baymax originally was not a healthcare companion. Having that freedom allowed us to create a different world and characters.”
It’s been a long time since the hokey kid-sidekick trope, ubiquitous in the 1940s and 50s, was allowed on the big screen. Iron Man 3 even referenced its unpopularity among fanboys with a great put-down by Robert Downey Jr. But Big Hero 6 looks like it has found a way to bring that stalwart of golden age back to multiplexes without any corniness.
It is a comic-book movie for kids, but people of any age will love it – whether they’re six or 66.
• Big Hero 6 marks Disney’s first proper step into comic-book adaptation
