It is literally impossible to sit through Big Hero Six without a still small voice echoing through your mind “The Lego Movie was robbed!” It’s not that it’s a bad movie, it’s that it beggars the understanding that it won an Oscar when The Lego Movie wasn’t even nominated. But its real problem is that there’s not enough Baymax and way too much superhero origin story. Baymax is loveable and weird and silly, and the movie can’t wait to cram him into armour and make him into a badass superhero along with a bunch of other superheroes. It’s as though the people making the movie didn’t realise that every character was more interesting as not-a-superhero.
Like so many movies these days, it’s great looking. I liked its vision of a nisei-run San Francisco, and never for a moment wondered how it was all supposed to work. Admittedly that was mostly because that part of my mind was preoccupied with how cheap and ubiquitous electronic components had become. What were all the hovering turbines supposed to be doing? I still don’t know. Maybe they were just supposed to look cool. They did that quite handily.
As always, I have to fight the temptation to see it all as a metaphor for the problems of our modern world. What could I read into a lovable obese kindly robot being weaponised and crammed into armour at the behest of a hyper active teenager on a revenge kick after a mysterious explosion levels an iconic building? Does that remind me of anything in particular? Tricky. Or is it just glamourising being a wobbly fat creature who walks like a baby with a full nappy (the actual model used for Baymax’s gait). Does the US really need to make being morbidly obese any more popular than it already is?
Nah.
Mind you, the one lesson for us all is that if you want to get anything done, schwack a dude’s parents. This is yet another movie aimed at kids where the protagonist’s parents are absent. Like they almost said in The Lego Movie, Everything is Orphans.
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