This weekend sees the release of Disney Animation’s latest film, Big Hero 6. The film centers around a young inventor named Hiro as he outfits his friends and personal healthcare robot Baymax in super-tech to apprehend a mysterious villain that’s using Hiro’s inventions for evil.
Many critics have noted that this film is an attempt by Disney to court boys the same way young girls flocked to Frozen one year ago. However, one-third of the Big Hero 6 team take some issue with that assertion. Jamie Chung and Genesis Rodriguez play Go Go and Honey Lemon, respectively. When asked about the perception that this film is more for boys, Chung praised the film for having strong female characters, “who are just as capable and intelligent as the boys.” She added that, “I hope it appeals equally to both,” to which Rodriguez responded, “It would have definitely appealed to me!”
Chung and Rodriguez say they’ve become fast friends since meeting only a couple of weeks ago, but none of the actors got to work with each other while recording their lines for the film. Each cast member had their own methods and techniques that were not only unique to them as actors, but for the characters they were playing. For example, while the voice of Hiro, Ryan Potter (who you can read our full interview with here), threw himself around the recording booth to simulate some of the action his character encounters in the film, Scott Adsit who plays Baymax had a much different experience. “I think part of the joy of Baymax is that his voice doesn’t match his actions all that much. So they don’t need to see what I’m doing. And generally I would stand there keeping my hands in one place so that my voice wasn’t affected by me moving,” Adsit said.
That may be one advantage to voicing a robot, but the role is not without its challenges. For one, Baymax not only provides comic relief but also advances the emotional arc of the story without, himself, displaying emotion. As Adsit explained, “I was really interested in seeing if I could have a relationship without displaying any emotions you could point to and say, ‘there’s an emotion.’ And still have some kind of character arc and emotional life, in spite of the evidence. That was my challenge and that was the great joy of this.”
In addition to Baymax, the character who arguably adds the most humor to the film is Fred voiced by comedian TJ Miller. Anyone who’s ever listened to the popular “Doug Loves Movies” podcast knows that Miller has a tendency to go off the rails sometimes with his non-stop improv. Luckily, this type of skill comes in handy when doing voice-over on this project. Miller says Disney gave him a lot of freedom to play with his character, explaining, “They sort of told us ‘thank you for partnering with us on this,’ not ‘thank you for being an employee or working on this’… ‘We want it to be your voice, we want it to be your comedy and do the weird stuff that you do and riff and take it in any direction.” But, at the same time, he says, “They provide you with such a great foundation, such good writing, such good stories, such great characters so it’s easy to riff off of those”
What makes the Big Hero 6 team different than many Marvel heroes is that their powers come from science and not science experiments gone wrong. As Damon Wayans Jr. who voices Wasabi put it, “These characters are normal human beings and what makes them superheroes is their minds; Hiro making all these special suits for these guys. They’re not from a Planet Farkinon or somewhere that gives them their powers.” Co-director Don Hall confirmed that this was an important element to them saying, “For this movie it was going to be no super powers, it was gonna be super tech, and then we kind of extrapolated from there.”
Because of its super smart leads, he film does help to empower “nerds” as well as inspire young thinkers. Producer Roy Conli says hopes this is the case. “I love that they’re makers, you know… I just hope that, to a degree, the kids that see this will go out to their garage and tear apart their father’s amplifier,” he said. Similarly, TJ Miller explained, “That’s something all kids can go ‘whoa, well maybe I can build a robot like Baymax or maybe I can do something to help the world.”
“Certainly a lot of people who work in animation spent a lot of their childhood in their bedroom, drawing and writing and we’re a variation on nerd, that’s for sure,” said co-director Chris Williams. That nerdom definitely shows in Big Hero 6, which Don Hall described in part as a, “love letter to Japanese pop-culture.” But as much brain as the film has, it has even more heart. “I think we all saw an emotional potential there, an emotional story between this kid who suffers a loss and this robot who tries to heal him,” Hall said.
Big Hero 6 is in theatres now. You can read Alex’s review of it here.