Big Hero 6

Ready for the unlikeliest screen superheroes yet? East meets West as Joseph McCabe discovers the funky future of Big Hero 6

The superhero genre dominates the 21st century boxoffice, and no company is more successful at making super-movies than Marvel. From 2008’s Iron Man to this summer’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, each Marvel film has powered its way to becoming a worldwide smash.

Of course Marvel made its name publishing the superhero comics on which its films are based. So it was only a matter of time before one of those comics inspired the animation division of its parent company, Walt Disney. But are audiences ready for a movie that represents the ultimate fusion of eastern and western approaches to SF and superheroes? Big Hero 6 directors Don Hall and Chris Williams think so.

“I was a big comic book fan,” Hall tells us when we chat with him at the Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank. “That’s what led me to go down the path of inquiring about something of Marvel’s and bringing it over. I was just reliving my childhood passions. I was a huge Marvel comics fan as a kid.

John Buscema and John Byrne were my two favorite artists. That inspired a love of drawing. How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way was right up there with The Illusion OfLife as far as tomes that inspired me as a kid. So the idea of combining those two passions was really what led to Big Hero 6.”

Hall — who got his start at Disney as a writer on 1999’s Tarzan — recalls approaching chief creative officer John Lasseter about his urge to work with characters from the company’s newly acquired Marvel Universe.

“We had a five-minute conversation where he was like, ‘That sounds great. I think it’s really cool. Why don’t you find something that you think would be appropriate to bring over?’” That “something” turned out to be a super-team title even more obscure than Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy.

“Avengers hadn’t come out yet. I don’t think Captain America had come out yet. But I knew Captain America was gonna be in Avengers, from being a dork and reading stuff. I knew all that was in the works. So I tried to stay away, when I was putting a list together, from stuff

I thought would be hands-off. I spent lunch hours combing through their website. And when I found Big Hero 6… It was the title that drew me to it originally. Then I saw it was a Japanese superhero team, and I bought the comics and loved them.”

Co-director Williams brought with him a love of fast-paced thrills and streamlined character stories that perfectly suited Big Hero 6’s tale (loosely adapted from the comic Man Of Action) of Hiro, a young robotics expert (voiced by Ryan Potter) who, after suffering a tragic loss, is befriended by Baymax (actor Scott Adsit), an inflatable robotic healthcare companion. The two soon discover that a mysterious kabuki-masked villain, known as Yokai, has stolen one of Hiro’s inventions — countless miniature multi-purpose droids known as microbots — and is using it to threaten the entire city.

“I’ve always been inspired by action movies,” says Williams, best known for helming (with How To Train Your Dragon’s Chris Sanders) the 2008 Disney feature Bolt.

“I love The Road Warrior and PrincessMononoke. Really well put together action scenes are so inspiring to me. But I also love really sweet little stories. I think you see a little bit of that in Bolt. Bolt is a movie that has these really big action scenes, but Bolt himself is such a simple and pure character. I really like that kind of innocence and that naive quality. I responded to that in Baymax.”

squishy emotions

Working with screenwriter Jordan Roberts, Hall fused the story of Hiro and Baymax’s new friendship to that of the titular superhero group, university students specializing in various fields of science and technology who join Hiro in battling Yokai: electromagnetics whiz GoGo Tomago (Jamie Chung), laser expert Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.), chemist Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), and the school’s mascot and resident comic-book junkie Fred (TJ Miller).

“That was the bulk of our effort in story,” admits Hall. “It was something that I recognised early on was gonna be one of the specific story challenges. I think we all did. We saw the merit in making it work, but it wasn’t until the emotional story between Hiro and Baymax was worked out that that became the spine of the movie. Then it was very clear that the team should hang on that. And how to do that really came out of Baymax being a little more pro-active. His mission is to heal this kid emotionally. Part of the treatment for this is to surround him with friends and loved ones.

Then it was like, ‘Oh, that’s how they’re going to be incorporated into the movie.’ It sewed them into the movie in an unbreakable way.” With their story in place, Hall and Williams turned to production designer Paul Felix (another veteran of Bolt) to develop the complex megalopolis of San Fransokyo. “It was always Don’s inclination to make sure that it was something wholly original,”

says Felix, taking a break from the lighting stage of production to tell us a little about Big Hero 6’s look. “That’s why he didn’t want to set it in someplace too recognisable.

The hope is that this would be the near future, like, ten years out. But that it was recognisably San Francisco was definitely the idea. We wanted to make sure that the parts of the city that you expect to see are where you would imagine them to be.”

To create the film’s setting, a cultural hybrid appropriate for its characters, Felix and his team undertook an intensive study of anime. “It helped us get a sense of how Japanese cities organise space; and the kinds of spaces you don’t find in American cities.

Like marketplace walkways, and the way they cram air conditioning ducts and dense detailing into those parts of the city. That was important, because it felt specific to a place.”

Examining Japan’s animation culture, Big Hero 6’s artists soon found themselves incorporating its minimalistic approach to character design, despite its challenges.

“The characters,” explains Felix, “are so stripped-down — not just the costumes but their features — that it was really important everything get placed in the right place. If one thing is slightly off, you know it.

There were fewer opportunities to put a mass of detail on and hope that something that doesn’t get resolved isn’t noticed. There were times that I could have taken a different design direction. Early on, we had this idea that they wouldn’t have access to a lot of the machinery they would need to make their costumes, so they would be more of a ragtag band.

Which is a cool aesthetic in and of itself, but in the end it started to feel better that they were more unified. They’re all geniuses, and 3D printing seems to be a big part of the show. So it just made sense.

“When Shiyoon Kim — our lead character designer — took his first pass at the costumes we have now he really wanted to come up with something that unifies them all.

He came up with the circle motif that you’ll find between their shoulder pads and their breastplates and on their helmets. That kind of curvilinear aesthetic was the one thing that we hoped would tie them together. We really wanted a more minimalistic approach to it, kind of Apple-like.

“Something John Lasseter wanted,” laughs Felix, “was to keep Baymax a little bit more relatable, and not just a perfect V shape. To feel big and imposing but keep a sense of the inflatable inside. So he still has that kind of rounded swell to his abdomen.”

In the end, it’s Baymax who, ironically, symbolises the spirit of Big Hero 6, revealing a core of humanity even while buried under layers of technology.

“I just fell in love with the characters,” says Hall, remembering his first encounter with the comic books, “and the potential for what we could do with them.”

Big Hero 6 is released on Friday 30 January.

MAKING MICROBOTS

Of the many challenges faced by Big Hero 6’s visual effects animators, none was greater than that of Hiro’s microbots — miniature robots that, when magnetically connected, are capable of almost any task.

“We did a lot of research on the latest technology being developed for robots,” says effects head Michael Kaschalk.

“We knew they needed to connect together. So we looked at nature and studied things like how ants will build a bridge and then use themselves to cross over to another area. But we didn’t want them to feel like they were some kind of creature. You might think the easiest thing for them to do to throw a car is to build some kind of arm and grab and throw it.

But we decided to stick with their mechanical nature and have the microbots come underneath the car and create something like a catapult.”

SOFT MACHINE

“The challenges in designing Baymax,” lead character designer Shiyoon Kim tells SFX, “were to make him appealing and to make him unique, a robot that we’ve never seen before. And huggable.

I don’t usually think of robots and ‘huggable’ at the same time…

Our team went to Carnegie Mellon University and they found out about soft robotics. So the idea came up, ‘What if Baymax was inflatable?’

“[Director] Don Hall, on his research trip to Japan, took a picture of these bells [on which there are] two circles connected with a line. Something about that iconography was really interesting.

I thought, ‘That could be a really cool face for a robot.’ In the beginning I put a mouth underneath, and I thought it might look better without the mouth. We pitched that idea to John [Lasseter], and John really loved it. It felt more robotic that way.”