A prodigy with no direction until his brother gives him one
Big Hero 6, directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams and released in November 2014, is Disney’s first animated feature built from Marvel Comics characters, following the corporate acquisition of Marvel Entertainment by Disney back in 2009. Hiro Hamada, a young robotics prodigy who has been spending his considerable talent on illegal underground bot-fighting for money, loses his older brother Tadashi in a fire at his university, and inherits Tadashi’s unfinished last invention as a result: Baymax, an inflatable healthcare companion robot originally designed to help people. The film premiered first at the Tokyo International Film Festival before its wider American release the following month.
A robot designed to be huggable, not fearsome
Director Don Hall based Baymax’s entire design on real research into soft robotics he encountered during a visit to Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, where researchers were actively developing inflatable vinyl limbs for potential future use as medical assistants in hospitals. The decision to build the film’s central character as a dedicated healer rather than a fighter shapes nearly every scene he appears in, since Baymax’s built-in instinct is always to assess and treat an injury first, even when the surrounding plot is actively pushing toward combat instead. Concept artist Lisa Keene is credited with the early idea that the robot should above all be huggable, well before its final look was settled.
A city built from two cities that never actually merged
The film is set in San Fransokyo, an invented hybrid city blending San Francisco’s hills and Victorian houses with Tokyo’s density, neon signage and scale, built on an unstated alternate history in which Japanese immigrants largely rebuilt San Francisco after the real 1906 earthquake devastated it. Production designer Paul Felix and the wider art department exaggerated the city’s topography for visual effect while keeping enough of both real cities recognisable that the finished hybrid setting reads as plausible and lived-in rather than arbitrary set dressing. Mecha designer Shigeto Koyama, known for his work on Japanese mecha anime, also contributed concept designs for Baymax’s armored form.
A villain whose reveal recontextualises everyone’s grief, not just Hiro’s
The film’s masked villain is eventually revealed to be directly connected to the same university fire that killed Tadashi, which reframes the entire climax: rather than introducing a wholly new external threat late in the story, the film reveals that Hiro and his antagonist have actually been processing the identical loss in opposite directions all along, one toward outright revenge and one, initially, toward Hiro’s own secretly reprogrammed and weaponised version of Baymax. Neither man’s grief is treated as more legitimate than the other’s, which is what makes the eventual reveal land as tragedy rather than simple plot mechanics.
Vengeance versus repair as the film’s actual argument
The film’s clearest argument is that channeling grief into vengeance, even when that vengeance is dressed up to look like conventional heroism, is a wrong turn rather than a genuinely triumphant one, and it makes that case literal by having Hiro strip down and rebuild Baymax’s combat armor piece by piece before eventually restoring his original, entirely non-violent healthcare programming instead. That reversal functions as the film’s real emotional climax, arguably even more than the final physical confrontation with the unmasked villain that follows it. The rest of Hiro’s makeshift team, Wasabi, Honey Lemon, GoGo and Fred, all gain armored upgrades of their own during this same stretch of the film.
Who should watch it
This suits families and children who may be quietly working through a loss of their own, since the film treats grief with considerably more directness than most mainstream animated superhero stories typically attempt to. Viewers primarily interested in continuous, uninterrupted action may find the more emotionally focused stretches, particularly around Tadashi’s death and its immediate aftermath, slower going than the marketing around a Marvel-derived superhero film would suggest going in, since the fights are never really the point of the story being told, unlike in most films built around a team of costumed heroes.
A hundred and two minutes with real weight behind the spectacle
At 102 minutes, with an original score by Henry Jackman, Big Hero 6 won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and grossed $657.8 million worldwide against a $165 million production budget, making it the single highest-grossing animated film released anywhere in 2014. Its considerable success suggests that taking grief this seriously did not ultimately cost the film any of its commercial appeal, and it remains worth the evening on both fronts at once, having also spawned three separate television series in the years since its original release, a sign of how thoroughly audiences took to Baymax specifically.