Big Hero 6 comes at an interesting time for Walt Disney Animation Studios. Not only is it their first story based on a Marvel property, the studio has to live up to their recent successes like Frozen and Wreck-it Ralph
Disney Animation was about two weeks away from completing animation on Big Hero 6 when we were invited to the studio on July 30. An exciting day of presentations, footage viewing, and one-on-one interviews were planned for our visit (this writer’s first time on the Animation Studios lot).
Big Hero 6 follows Hiro, a 14-year-old robotics wiz who’s forced to face a life-altering event that no kid his age should have to deal with. The unfortunate incident leads Hiro to team up with Baymax, a healthcare robot created by Hiro’s older brother Tadashi, when evil begins to cast itself over their home of San Fransokyo. Hiro and Baymax work with a group of new heroes to create the “Big Hero 6” team.
More on the feature film in a second. First…
‘Feast’
Our day at Disney began in Animation Studios’ screening room where we watched the completed short film Feast which will run in front of Big Hero 6 in theaters. The film is the first to be completed through Disney’s new short film program Spark, where artists in house can pitch projects and work towards getting green-lit for production.
Feast is an adorable short story about a Boston Terrier named Winston who has a big appetite and notices changes in his owner’s life through the food he’s given. The delicious food that Feast’s production team chose for the dog are items that Americans will identify with on first glance and find delicious, according to director Patrick Osborne, who was the head of animation on the 2012 short film Paperman.
At the end of Feast there’s a disclaimer which warns kids (and parents) to feed their pets responsibly. Like when kids wanted to free their fish after seeing Finding Nemo, so too will they want to suddenly give their pets all of what we eat.
Feast is another excellent short film from Disney that makes you yell an audible “aw” by the end.
What we saw from ‘Big Hero 6’ (spoiler free)
After seeing Feast we were treated to a large group of completed footage from the main event.
Scenes that we watched from Big Hero 6 included young Hiro demo-ing his unique robotics technology called microbots at a science fair, a sweet scene where Hiro and his older brother Tadashi bond over the former’s future, a big life event for the brothers (which we don’t want to spoil here), and a beautiful flight sequence for the two unlikely super heroes.
The footage left me very excited to see the final product. Several interesting arcs were set up which looked like they’d yield great development over the course of the film. Disney didn’t show us footage of the Big Hero 6 team all suited-up and in action, but from what the crew told me, the scenes towards the end are big and exciting. Unsurprisingly, I think this movie is going to go over very well with kids thanks to the lead character, his entertaining new friend Baymax, and their ambitions.
One more scene we watched was one Disney released on Tuesday, in which Baymax and Hiro meet following a tragedy (no spoilers, just some fun interactions):
We also saw plenty of footage depicting the film’s setting.
Welcome to San Fransokyo
The team behind Big Hero 6 decided to mesh two iconic cities together to create a unique setting for their heroes. San Fransokyo is a hybrid consisting of elements from San Francisco, California and Tokyo, Japan. The decision to divert from the comic’s location of strictly Tokyo stems partly from the fact that the Big Hero 6 movie doesn’t pull from the comic at all, other than the title and names of characters.
Explained producer Roy Conli to Hypable, “Don [Hall, director], when he decided that he wanted to work with this material, was really pushed into — you do not have to keep it in this universe, you do not have to do anything other than let this be an inspiration to you. And one of the things that John Lasseter wants to know before any film is, he wants to know what the film is. Don decided that he wanted to explore an alternate universe so to speak, but alternate in a way that was just paralleling us.”
While San Fransokyo doesn’t exist in the real world, the team wanted it to feel like it’s the San Francisco or Tokyo that you already know. “We talked about the fact that it was just a couple years ahead of us, but we didn’t want it to be an alien universe,” said Conli, “and we wanted to create a world that people just want to be in. And to do a pure San Francisco or a pure Tokyo, just didn’t seem as enchanting as doing a mash up where, oddly enough I think everybody – people in Tokyo and people in California – are going to feel very comfortable in this world. It becomes in a sense a celebration of the Pacific Rim.”
The two cities were selected in part because the comics the film is based on are set in Tokyo, but also because San Francisco hasn’t been used by Marvel before. “Don wanted to stay out of New York because that’s the Marvel universe,” explained Conli. “And Los Angeles doesn’t have the amazing, iconic aspects of a city the way that San Francisco – it’s so iconic. You have the Golden Gate Bridge, you’ve got the Bay Bridge, the hills, you’ve got Alcatraz, you’ve got Angel’s Island, Market Street. It also has a certain aesthetic that we thought would blend well with Tokyo.”
Adapting and Cracking a Story
This is the first time that Walt Disney Animation Studios has taken a Marvel property and turned it into a film. Rather than going the live action route and adapting elements of the comics, WDAS decided to take virtually nothing from the comics but the “Big Hero 6” title and the names of its characters.
One of the biggest character changes may be the character of Baymax. The only similarity between the comic and film versions is his interest in protecting Hiro. Take a look at how he appears in Marvel comic books:
As demonstrated by footage we saw during our Animation Studios visit and what you’ve seen in promotional footage, Baymax is funny. But it’s his “naivety,” in the words of Conli, that’s what makes him an amusing robot to watch.
“Look at [actress] Judy Holliday,” he said. “There was something absolutely engaging in Judy Holliday because she had this naivety, and Baymax it’s on a narrower band on a certain sense. And Scott Adsit – he was the head writer on 30 Rock, one of the best improv artists around right now. We gave him a very narrow band to play in, but he was able to always shape a line in such a way – in the three to four note range we were giving him to play – bend a line and just get it perfectly.”
Baymax’s limited physical features and very simple looking face created an interesting opportunity for animators. “You’ve got two eyes that can blink and sort of do a nod or a head tilt, but that’s all you’ve got to work with from an acting standpoint,” the director explained, “and you can actually have an array of lots of different thoughts that people can impose on Baymax. That’s so much in the fun of this character and the promise of this character.”
The differences between the movie and comic don’t stop there. Big Hero 6 screenwriter Robert Baird admitted to us he has yet to read one of the comics. “This story was inspired by the comic books but I knew it was going to be Disney’s take on this story, so I haven’t looked at the comics yet,” he told us with a “I don’t know if I should say this” preface. “We didn’t really want to be influenced by another property, we just wanted to look at this as its own story.”
Paul Briggs, Head of Story on the film, noted that Frozen took a similar approach. Brings told us he didn’t read many of comics while preparing for Big Hero 6 because he was “just focused on a fresh, original new story.
“Much like with Snow Queen, we pulled some things for Frozen, but Frozen is a very unique, different story. So same thing with this, we have a different take,” he said.
Bringing Disney Animation to Marvel and a property like Big Hero 6 was a tough situation to “crack,” as it was described to me so many times during my visit to the studio. By the comments Briggs and Baird made me in our interview as well as during a group presentation, the process of finding a story that goes over well with their in-house screening audiences is extremely difficult.
A big moment for the team was nailing down the first act which mean putting Hiro on a path to using his skills for the greater good.
“There are dozens of different beginnings to this movie that sit in a drawer somewhere that we tried,” said Baird. “We always knew that we wanted Hiro and his brother and the super hero team to be these smart, academic characters who are passionate about science and so on. And we also knew – and we came to this sort of late in the game – we wanted Hiro to have a sort of want. What is his want in the first act?”
The “crack” came from putting him into college. “When we said his want should be to get into this college and use his gift for something bigger, and that college would bring this out, once we landed on that it felt like that’s something interesting and relatable and hopefully inspirational to people too.”
Another challenge, which had left them suffering from lack of sleep at night, was finding a good balance in tone. “There are some heavy things that happen in it and it so easily can become one way or another. And so once at that screening when we were like, ‘I think we found the right tone,’ it’s this balance of drama and comedy, that was a moment where I felt like, ‘Finally, I can sleep again.'”
On Page 2: How ‘Big Hero 6’ lives up to the Disney legacy, and the greatness of John Lasseter
Living up to the Disney legacy
After the huge success of Frozen last year, viewers will be going into this film expecting the same heart and soul that Anna and Elsa brought to the table. Although Big Hero 6 is an entirely different story, the film will still present themes that you’d want to see and feel in any Disney narrative.
In co-director Chris Williams’ words, Big Hero 6 uses family to create a “universal emotional story” that viewers will find to be very Disney.
“The thing that seems to define all these eclectic [Disney] movies is that there’s a sense of timelessness. People can watch Dumbo, people can watch Pinocchio, and Bambi and all these movies, and we’re in a place where we’re carrying that heritage forward,” Williams told us in our sit-down interview. “We don’t want to be limited by it – we don’t want to say, because we’re Disney we can’t do these types of things, but we do want it to have this type of timeless quality. We want to believe that years from now, our kids will be sharing it with their kids and on and on. That’s the thing that to me makes it a Disney movie.”
Co-director Don Hall, who joined the project before Williams, told us “the heart and the humor” makes it Disney. “I’ve always felt like we’ve done character-driven action films with tons of heart and humor, but this one may’ve brought out more of the action elements, but I’ve always felt our best movies are character driven and have tons of action and tons of tears.
“Not TONS of tears, but enough,” he added with a laugh. “[Big Hero 6] has got the right amount of tears.”
After hearing Hall’s thoughts, Williams agreed that these Disney qualities in Big Hero 6 were what drew him to the project to begin with. “I was always attracted to the fact that this story had this very tiny, potent sweet story about this relationship between this boy and the robot, and this big, over the top action packed story, and the fact that one’s not over there and one’s over there, they actually cohabitate nicely. That’s something I’m very excited about.”
In a separate interview, producer Roy Conli told us that he believes Big Hero 6 makes you want to live in its world, thus making it a Disney story.
“Every super hero story that I’ve seen, every romantic comedy that I’ve seen, every film that I’ve fallen in love with, at the heart is a world that you want to be in and people that you really care for,” he told us in his office which sits right off the main hallway where Big Hero 6 is in development. “That’s the general hallmark of what a Disney film is, and I think Marvel is the same way. I love Tony Stark. I’m interested in Tony Stark, I worry about Tony Stark – I want to be Tony Stark! I think what we’re achieving through this relationship is, wouldn’t you want a Baymax? That relationship carries you through the entire movie, and it’s such a wonderful relationship that is somewhat enviable.”
The John Lasseter Effect
Pixar legend (and Chief Creative Officer) John Lasseter offers help across all of the Mouse House’s animation work, but what surprised us during our time with Big Hero 6’s team was just how highly everyone spoke of him.
From the producer to the directors to the story developers, everyone believes Lasseter is an extremely important part of the Disney family.
“He is the busiest man in Hollywood I think,” said Baird. “I don’t know how he does it. He’s executive producer of every movie at Pixar and every movie here at Disney, and then at DisneyToon Studios too. And he manages to keep all these stories in his head. And we’re checking in with him every couple of weeks, every month. He is the guy – he is the greatest story brain out there. And we have him as a resource.”
One of Lasseter’s special abilities is the way he relates to the story development team because he has experienced the same problems that they have. When they have issues, Lasseter sits with them to find a solution. Explained Baird, “John comes in and goes, ‘Yeah, I know how hard it is [making stories],’ and he asks the right questions. There are times where I’ll be pitching something to him and I’m saying to myself, ‘He is not here he is not here he is not here.’ As soon as I’m done pitching he comes out with stuff and I’m like, ‘You are on point.’ I’ve learned so much from him.”
Added Briggs, “What’s really cool about John too, and I appreciate this a lot, with [Disney CEO] Bob Iger and [Disney Chairman] Alan Horn the same way, they will present their thoughts and feelings towards things but it’s not necessarily marching orders. John will go, ‘Here’s how I’m feeling, here’s how I’m reacting towards it,’ and if you explain to him, ‘Well I hear what you’re saying but that doesn’t work and here are the reasons it doesn’t work,’ John is just one of the story guys in the room. He’ll go, ‘I get that, yeah, go down that route. That’s smart, do that.’ To have a relationship like that with a creative executive where he’s helping you craft this thing is special.”
This ability to send development teams in the right direction is part of what’s ushered Disney into a special area following the success of films like Frozen and Wreck-it Ralph. “I think there’s a maturity that this studio has undergone under the tutelage of John [Lasseter],” Conli said to me in the most serious tone of our interview. “The maturation of the culture of the studio has really taken root. We are such a collaborative – we communicate so well now. I’ve always loved animation because there’s no ego in it. But with John any bit of ego is out the window and it’s all great filmmaking.”