Disney’s Big Hero 6 is entirely tolerable while at the same time 100% mediocre. I enjoyed myself enough during the film’s 108-minute running time, but as soon as I left the theater memories of what I’d seen began to fade. It’s essentially a cinematic candy bar, enjoyable while consuming, but when you’re done you’re debating the value of feasting on it in the first place. It hits all the right beats, a little sweet on the outside with bits of substance on the inside, but like any piece of candy you’ve had before, this movie hits all the standard story beats, never really feeling new or fresh, but more like the same old product in a new wrapper… IN 3D!!!!
Considering Big Hero 6 is a Disney movie you know at least one parent is going to be dead once we meet the film’s lead character, Hiro Hamada (voiced by Ryan Potter), a 14-year-old robotics prodigy. But in fact, both Hiro’s parents are dead and he and his older brother Tadashi (voiced by Daniel Henney) live with their wacky aunt (voiced by Maya Rudolph) in the neon city of San Fransokyo. Hiro is a bit of a loner, choosing to spend his time at underground bot fights (think cock fighting with homemade robots), while his brother attends San Fransokyo Tech working on all the latest advancements in technology.
Tadashi, however, isn’t going to let his brother’s talent go to waste, urging him to enter a competition that could win him an immediate enrollment in San Fransokyo Tech, on his way to bigger and better things. Yadda, yadda, yadda, he enters the competition, wins the scholarship and all is fine until Tadashi ends up dying (yes, now his brother is also dead) in an explosion at the school. Ultimately it’s Tadashi’s inflatable healthcare companion robot Baymax (voiced by Scott Adsit) that gets Hiro out of mourning and on a path to look deeper into his brother’s death alongside Tadashi’s college friends GoGo (voiced by Jamie Chung), Wasabi (voiced by Damon Wayans, Jr.), Honey Lemon (voiced by Génesis RodrÃguez) and Fred who is voiced by the always comedically reliable T.J. Miller.
To be clear, none of this is bad, it just all feels entirely familiar, uninspired and calculated to trigger all the synapses a countless number of films like it have fired off before. In short, it’s satisfyingly average.
As Baymax, Adsit voices a cute, puffy, marshmallow of a character, a do-gooder that keeps the spirit of Tadashi alive throughout the film, providing lessons to be learned and given the fact Hiro is a 14-year-old academically inclined beyond his years, he’s still allowed to make childish mistakes and learn from them and his friends around him.
Otherwise, the majority of the voice cast really doesn’t bring too much to the film outside of any punchy one-liners from the team of screenwriters that included Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson and Jordan Roberts, adapting the Marvel comic for the big screen. The only voice member to bring anything truly special beyond the character norms is T.J. Miller who’s no stranger to such comedy relief having done so in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise and even earlier this year in Transformers: Age of Extinction.
For adults, Big Hero 6 is fun though forgettable, and kids will probably eat it up as it provides more than enough costume fodder for Halloweens to come, along with sequels, television spin-offs, lunch boxes, action figures and whatever else Disney can dream up. The best the film has to offer, however, is the short film that precedes it titled “Feast” centered on a stray puppy that finds a home with a junk food eating bachelor. Of course, this could be looked at in very negative ways as the short film seems to encourage the joys of munching on fattening foods and the movie dares suggest a corporate CEO could be a master criminal. I’m not quite cynical enough to focus on such things, but I know for a fact that will become part of the narrative once the media gets their hands on this one.
