Big Hero 6

After the Oscars, I couldn't miss the Big Hero 6, so I headed to the cinema to see if the golden statue had landed in the right hands. Personally, I would have handed the Academy Award to How to Train Your Dragon 2, but Big Hero 6 is also an above average film that is both funny poignant and action-packed, something that many of today's animated films that are only aimed at younger audiences sadly lack. I liked the animation and the idea of an Asian version of San Francisco, which also had its own charm. Baymax the robot is an incredibly cute character who won me over right away, as did the other characters in the gang of young scientists. All in all, a quality and well-made animated film that perhaps pushes the envelope a bit too much at times in terms of lessons for the young ones, but it still impressed me a lot and is deserving of the rating. (05/14/2015)

Very solid, but also very standard – Big Hero 6 is a precisely rendered product where nothing is left to chance. Action, humour and emotion alternate with mechanical precision, the dramaturgy follows a checklist and the ideas stay within the boundaries of being refreshing but never cross over into an area where it could have a sense of originality or even distinctiveness. It is simply Disney’s subordination of brand image, tellingly stated in the internal FIFO directive, which in this case doesn’t mean "first in, first out" but "fit in or fuck off" (that’s not a fabrication, but an eyewitness account). On the other hand, creativity certainly could not be expected from the result of the merger of Marvel and Disney. After the brilliant Frozen, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ latest production is a step away from the murky waters of ambition into the tried-and-true confines of comic-book adaptations. In the end, we can still be glad that this time the annoying pandering to fans was mostly limited to the post-credit sequence. Big Hero 6 heralds the standardised production from the Disney media conglomerate, which has set a course for world domination and, after the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel Entertainment and Lucasarts, there is nothing standing in its way. (11/02/2015)

Avengers meets StarGate in a Disney animated version. In some places, the film quotes scenes of other films so blatantly (e.g. Iron Man at the end of Avengers and Hiro at the end of Big Hero 6) that it can no longer be considered a rip-off, but rather a spoof. I’m sure there’ll be people bothered by the overall lack of originality and creativity, I can see them already, but that doesn’t bother me much in animated films. It’s cute, entertaining, funny, even a little emotional, which is enough for an animated comic-book fairy-tale. (01/14/2015)

In a world where Japan won the Second World War (it really reminded me of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle), robotics are very advanced, the world is prospering and everything is sort of fine. Disney has come up with a great watch for kids in Incredibles style with an admixture of Stark Industries and they got me. There is a strong comic book element, but the creators work within the bounds of an intelligent kids viewing. Of course, Baymax is awesome and, even though the other characters are basically superfluous frills, nobody has time to notice. An entertaining tearjerker. Balalala. (01/13/2015)

The whole time I was watching the movie I kept thinking whether the movie was actually for kids. One boy dies, everybody speaks in a super bad-ass way and then I realized that todayʼs kids are probably different; I am not excusing the death but the bad-ass language. It was all based on these two points and I have to admit that the only cute thing was the inflatable robot and that’s before he learned kung-fu and before the Japanese genius put him in the aluminum suit. At the same time, I don’t think I really laughed watching this, especially when compared to Zootopia, for example. So, even though Big Hero 6 is not a bad cartoon, there is still a lot of negatives that bumped the final score down to three stars. (01/16/2017)