The next Marvel superhero movie you see won’t be an Iron Man or a Captain America. It will be Big Hero 6, based on a little known Marvel comic. This one is a Disney Animation film, the first collaboration between Disney’s animation studio and Marvel comics.
At an early press event for Big Hero 6, the filmmakers introduced us to Hiro and Baymax. Hiro is an inventor who went to San Fransokyo Tech to unveil his microbots, miniature robots that can combine to form anything. Hiro’s brother Tadashi dies in an accident and his health care robot Baymax takes care of Hiro. In one of the film’s action scenes, Hiro and Baymax find a microbot factory where the villain, Yohai, has stolen the microbots for his own purposes. We spoke with directors Don Hall and Chris Williams about Big Hero 6, which is in theaters November 7.
CraveOnline: Do these characters come from the Big Hero 6 comic books?
Don Hall: Yes, all of them. There’s a character named Baymax and a character named Hiro and Fred and Honey and Go Go. Their names are taken from the original comic.
So is it in name only, or do they have the same powers and personalities too?
Chris Williams: They would resemble the original characters and their powers.
Don Hall: Yeah, so in the original comic, Wasabi was a sushi chef who I think he could throw plasma blades out of his body or something like that. We just wanted to make it grounded in reality, so he has mechanical blades that emit plasma beams so it’s not magic. Same thing with Fred, in the comics he can turn into a ghost of a giant monster. Again, we had to ground it in reality, so in our version, he’s wearing sort of a mechanized kaiju suit. So I just tried to take what was present in the original comics and just ground it in a little bit more of a scientific reality.
Chris Williams: Yeah, they’re all born out of the original comic and inspired by the original comic, but then as we put together our story and the relationships and characters evolve, they’ve evolved quite a bit from where they started.
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Are the microbots a new invention?
Don Hall: Yeah, that was strictly us, and Yokai is strictly us as well.
Was there a specific format to adapting Asian architecture to landmarks like The Golden Gate Bridge for San Fransokyo?
Don Hall: A lot of came from our art director and production designer. Our environments art director, Scott Watanabe, he was in visual development and early on I saw he had such a great eye for how to combine these things. He really took on the challenge of taking the city, how and where to put the influences and to be very specific so that it was Japanese and not other Asian cultures. He really was instrumental in defining that look.
Chris Williams: The idea is that a lot of the city’s bones are San Francisco, the layout is essentially San Francisco.
Don Hall: Geographically.
Chris Williams: Geographically, but then a lot of the aesthetic is Japanese.
Is Baymax deceptively simple?
Chris Williams: Haha. Yes.
Don Hall: Capital Y, capital E, capital S.
Chris Williams: On some level, he’s a robot who’s subject to his programming and he’s a nurse robot. He’s programmed to do all these different medical procedures, but I think along the way, we’re really inviting the audience to infer and project a lot of things onto Baymax and sense that there’s something more. He’s smarter than he’s letting on or he knows more than he’s letting on and he’s actually learning as he goes. That’s something we did want.
We wanted to be, on one hand, restrictive with this guy and make sure he was a robot, not just a guy in a robot costume. But we also wanted to give ourselves a little bit of leeway to have the character evolve. The fact that he’s just two eyes, no mouth and all he can do is blink, that’s classic animation because it’s really paring things down to their essence and allowing people to infer so much into the tiniest little thing.
When Baymax does a certain blink or a certain head tilt, people can infer lots of things. They can get inside Baymax’s head and they understand he’s thinking right now. he’s trying to figure out how to solve this problem. He’s trying to figure out how to understand this kid. He’s trying to figure out how to get past the bed. That, to me, is when animation is at its best, when people are invited to impose things onto the characters.
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Are you using the squash and stretch animation philosophy?
Chris Williams: Yeah, he’s great for that.
Don Hall: He epitomizes squash and stretch.
Chris Williams: We have, obviously, these incredible CG animators but a lot of them come from a traditional 2D animation background. So they’re really good at grounding the characters and giving them weight, but there’s a little bit of caricature as well. They’re so good at paring things down so Baymax became a perfect sort of muse for them, because they were able to bring all their talents as 2D animators to bear with a lot of squash and stretch.
Your FX artists told us there are seven action sequences in the movie. Is one of them the one we saw in the microbot factory?
Don Hall: Mm-hmm.
How different are the other six action sequences?
Don Hall: That’s one of the things we’re proud of. They all have a different flavor. They’re not just one note type action scenes. There’s some that bend a little bit more comedic. There’s some that are a little bit more dramatic, some that are even a little more tragic so they all have a little bit of a different flavor which is just a testament to our story artists and just the story in general. We really wanted to make sure that each one had a different flavor.
Chris Williams: There are some where it’s real fun and entertaining, and others where you feel a little more peril. Having some variety over the course of the movie was really important.
Is one of the challenges with team movies finding a way to incorporate each character in each sequence?
Don Hall: Absolutely. It’s a lot of mouths to feed as far as story goes. Especially because the core relationship of the movie is Hiro and Baymax, the team story had to fall on those bones. The spine is the Hiro/Baymax relationship story. The team definitely had to be a part of that. Finding a way to connect them to that story was always going to be a tricky challenge storywise but we finally cracked it. Yes, it’s very difficult in these team movies to try and make sure you find little moments where each one can shine.
Chris Williams: And they all have to fire off each other. One of the biggest challenges is you can craft all these different characters but if they don’t play well together, if they’re not great foils for each other, then you’ve missed an opportunity. So you’re always crafting all the different characters together and making sure that they all make sense together. And a real danger with a movie like this, where there’s a lot of different disparate story elements, is that things will start to feel extraneous.
If we’re in a position where you say, “Oh, this story could’ve happened without the team,” then you’ve failed. They have to be integral to the story. They have to be really providing something fundamental to the story. So that was a big challenge, to make sure everybody played an important role in the movie.
Were there any Fred or Go-Go subplots that just had to go?
Chris Williams: I’d say there were notions about personalities and moments that felt really good but in the grand scheme of things were making things overly long or started to feel extraneous and they had to go. You have to make sure that they’re serving the main character and serving the story.
How do the supporting characters do that and serve the main story, while also having their own stories?
Don Hall: Well, they’re all pulled together by Baymax. They’re all Tadashi’s friends early in the story and Hiro starts to get ingratiated into that community when he gets accepted to SFT, but then pulls away after the death of Tadashi. It’s actually Baymax who’s instrumental in bringing them back together again as Hiro’s support group. From Baymax’s point of view, he’s just trying to heal the patient and one of the ways to heal a patient is to make sure he’s surrounded by people who care for him. So they kind of fulfilled that function in the movie and obviously they have moments within all the action scenes where each does certain things that are comedic or cool. They all function in that capacity as far as they are Hiro’s support group.
Chris Williams: There’s a moment in the movie where one of the characters becomes really important as far as the inception of the idea to become a superhero. There’s another part of the movie where someone is really there for Hiro emotionally when he needed it. You try to find those moments where they really are impactful.
Is the villain going to be a little bit scary for younger kids?
Chris Williams: We wondered about that because I think he’s so cool looking. We tried to light him to make him cool and awesome and scary. Then I looked at it and I thought, “I love this but is this too much for kids?” But, I think in our action scenes and when the villain is a threat, you also have Baymax. He’s so reassuring and so funny that we watched the movie with a family test audience, and they were laughing and just enjoying it. Even the scenes with Yohai in them, and that was very reassuring to me to know that we can give people the comic book fix, at the same time not be too much for kids.
I don’t think it’s ever too scary. We all grew up with edgy stuff.
Don Hall: Absolutely.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode EverandThe Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
