Big Hero 6

Let’s start with an under­state­ment: Walt Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios’ 2013 musi­cal fan­ta­sy Frozen did pret­ty well. Be that at the box office, at the Oscars, in mer­chan­dise stores the world over, or stuck deep inside the heads of any­one with­in earshot of its insuf­fer­ably catchy tunes. Now, for the first time in two decades, Dis­ney is on top, and they’re not will­ing to let it go.

To fol­low Frozen’s stone-cold suc­cess, Dis­ney have rum­maged around in their envi­able IP archive and unearthed an almost-for­got­ten Mar­vel Comics series from the late 1990s. Fed through the Dis­ney cre­ative meat grinder, this fin­ished film bears lit­tle rela­tion to its ​‘source’ com­ic, but one key rela­tion­ship sur­vives the tran­si­tion, that between young, gift­ed boy-sci­en­tist Hiro and his robot­ic bud­dy Baymax.

The Dis­ney Touch comes in this reimag­i­na­tion of Bay­max as a Pills­bury Dough Boy/​C‑3PO hybrid, as adorable as he is mar­ketable, and the del­i­cate – if tidy – ways that the char­ac­ter is inter­twined with the film’s Key Themes. Hiro, a 14 year-old tear­away, is bare­ly kept in check by his con­sci­en­tious elder broth­er Tadashi and over­worked aunt Cass, but the oppor­tu­ni­ty to study robot­ics gives him some direc­tion and pur­pose. How­ev­er, dis­as­ter strikes, Tadashi is lost in a trag­ic acci­dent, and Hiro is left with only his brother’s uni­ver­si­ty project, the health­care bot Bay­max, for company.

With this emo­tion­al core, name­ly pro­cess­ing and work­ing through grief, in place, Big Hero 6 con­jures up a rel­a­tive­ly rote (yet, at 92 min­utes, unde­ni­ably breezy) ani­mat­ed adven­ture tale. A mys­te­ri­ous vil­lain soon comes on the scene and sets about ter­ror­is­ing San Fran­sokyo (imag­ine a colour­ful spin on a near-future East-meets-West mega­lopo­lis), and Hiro suits up Bay­max as a jer­ry-rigged super­hero, and con­vinces a hand­ful of fel­low stu­dents to har­ness the pow­er of their learn­ing for the pur­pose of fight­ing evil. Plot aside, though, there’s no end of plea­sure to be found in the film’s excit­ing set pieces, exquis­ite ani­ma­tion and eccen­tric char­ac­ters (Bay­max him­self is a delight).

With its rich sub­text, Big Hero 6 feels like a minor riff on two films by for­mer Dis­ney and Pixar ani­ma­tor Brad Bird, The Iron Giant and The Incred­i­bles. But unlike Bird’s mas­ter­pieces, this film has an ulte­ri­or motive, and a deli­cious­ly under­hand one at that. Big Hero 6 is a PG, which the BBFC class­es as suit­able for kids ​‘aged 8 and over’, in oth­er words a gen­er­a­tion of film­go­ers who were born in the wake of, or grew up along­side, the releas­es of Iron Man and Marvel’s sub­se­quent ​‘cin­e­mat­ic universe’.

As sequels, crossovers and events fur­ther expand (and com­pli­cate) that uni­verse, Big Hero 6 seems like a train­ing-wheels super-primer, an intro­duc­tion to the tropes and tricks – trag­ic ori­gin sto­ries, hero­ic sac­ri­fice, Mar­vel­lous post-cred­it cameos – that the nip­pers will glee­ful­ly recog­nise once they’re old enough for the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy (a 12A) and Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The Win­ter Sol­dier (a 12).

To craft an engag­ing, excit­ing fam­i­ly adven­ture com­plete with ten­der life lessons and a merch-friend­ly cud­dly robot pal is one thing. To main­tain cor­po­rate cre­ative syn­er­gy across gen­er­a­tion gaps? That’s the famil­iar Dis­ney mag­ic, right there.