15/1/18 - Film Review: Big Hero 6

Hello everyone! Today is the first instalment of another segment I am implementing. Once or twice a month I will be writing and posting reviews of films that I watch. Some may be older, having been released years ago and others may be new cinematic releases. Throughout this year, I hope to share my opinions of films with you and hopefully persuade you to give the film a watch if you haven't already!

Great! So what exactly will I be discussing within these reviews?
Plot
Character and their development
Viewer Engagement
My favourite moment
My least favourite moment
Anything else!

So... which film is going to be the subject of my first ever Film Review on my blog?

Disney's Big Hero 6 (2014)

These reviews will contain SPOILERS!

In my personal opinion, the increasing levels of sophistication and maturity in films in Disney seemed to derive from Big Hero 6, and extend onward to newer phenomena such as Inside Out. This is due to the fact that both films tackle a character and their emotional state. In essence, in Big Hero 6, the protagonist, Hiro Hamada is struggling to grieve over his older brother Tadashi, after he is killed in a fire. He is aided by Baymax, a robot that Tadashi built to be a healthcare companion and help people improve their health and lifestyles. Baymax seeks to improve Hiro's emotional state during his period of grief.

And in Inside Out (2015), Riley's emotional voided state is revoked through Sadness fixing the mood-board that the emotions use to register themselves in her daily life. Sadness evokes an emotional state in order to keep Riley safe.

In both cases, Disney managed to create a strong evocative atmosphere.

Plot!

I found the plot interesting in this film and was intrigued by how Hiro's character arc would play out. Once he found out his micro-bots had been recovered from the fire I was hooked. I wanted to know everything - how, who had done it, had they started the fire?

It was a very well-thought-out structure! I really enjoyed watching it!

Character: 

Unpopular opinion, thinking back, I didn't really learn a lot about the characters within the Big Hero 6 team. If I had to recall their names I would forget at least one or two of them! I feel like due to having such a large team and a complicated plot, it meant that the development of the side characters was unified and was therefore not as memorable.

The arc of the Big Hero 6 team was in essence, the following.

Fred, Wasabi, Honey Lemon and Gogo Tomago ((whose name I had to GOOGLE)), were originally technological whizzes that attended the same "nerd school" as Tadashi Hamada

When Tadashi was lost in the fire, they each grieved and decided to support his younger brother through this troubling time.

In the process of attempting to be there for Hiro, they found themselves having to evade the attacks of Callaghan.

They decided that they should help Hiro as they too wanted to know who was behind Tadashi's death

Once they saw that Hiro was willing to terminate Callaghan, they fought against Baymax's destructive tech.

But they decided that despite Hiro's irrationality, Callaghan had to be stopped

But did the characters get individual development? Not really - they each derived from a character archetype - a pattern of human behaviour or a trope found in the media.

For example Wasabi is the shy character, while Gogo Tomagi was the quiet one. Honey Lemon is depicted to be the eccentric pretty character and Fred is the outgoing geeky character. These tropes were spliced up with the fact that most were immensely talented within the scientific field and would be seen as great scientific prodigies.

HOWEVER, the character of Hiro was very realistic and believable - he was well constructed and had flaws in his irrationality and impulsive nature despite being an academic genius. He is fourteen years old and makes sporadic decisions due to not being completely emotionally mature, while the people he associates with are considerably older than him and are able to establish a difference between wanting to hurt Callaghan because he is the reason Tadashi died, and actually lashing out and impacting their futures and jeopardising their entire academic career's worth of work, and Tadashi's legacy by having Baymax hurt Callaghan.

I found Hiro a very interesting and complex character and really enjoyed seeing his story play out.


Viewer Engagement

I found that Big Hero 6 and the message it was conveying was very interesting and engaging, despite being older than the implied target audience, as the film was created by Disney. This concept of dealing with more complicated and mature themes of life demonstrates that despite the fact that people presume children are not able to understand complex ideas like death and missing people, children experience this every day. It is absolutely amazing that this is finally being recognised by such an iconic corporation!

My favourite moment

Out of the entirety of Big Hero 6, I found that my favourite moment had to be "Tadashi Is Here"

I felt that that scene was immensely powerful, as the repetition of what Baymax said earlier slowly resonates with Hiro. The hesitation between Baymax saying this and the videos of Tadashi playing allows the viewer a few moments to contemplate whether Baymax understands the concept of Heaven and the afterlife.


My least favourite moment

My least favourite moment of the film would have to be the montage where the characters learned how to become superheroes, enhancing their technological prowess etc. I feel that if this had been given a few shorter scenes, it would have given the rest of the team chances to develop as individuals. But I do admit that in order to do this, many other great scenes would potentially need to be cut down or removed from the production completely. I hope that this film gets a sequel so that the rest of the team can develop.

Anything else!

Immortals by Fall Out Boy? I am so grateful for this film for giving us this song!

Thank you for reading my review and I hope you give this film a watch!
And remember:
Per Ardua Ad Asta
- Imogen. L. Smiley