Big Hero 6 or "A Testament to Moderate Masculinity, with Traces of Contrived Evil"

Hey. It's been a while. Um, how're you? *shuffles feet awkwardly* Look, I'm sorry. I've been super busy, I'm in college now and it's very time consuming. I know that's no excuse, I should have at least checked in once in a while, and I was going to, but I lost my nerve and it just... well, it just got worse as time passed, as it inevitably does, gradually getting further and further away from the last time I wrote anything here. I'm bad with commitment, you know this by now. I- I'll try not to leave you for so long again. I can't make any promises but I'll try.

Am- am I forgiven? Can you find it in your collective hearts to pardon my inconsistencies? 

Yes? I'm gonna take your silence as a yes.

For the record, this is my exact "forgive me?" expression.
Internet, you know me so well

Okay, Now that we have that melodramatic apology shtick out of the way, I'm going to talk about Big Hero 6! A film review! Of a popular movie! That's bound to redeem me in the eyes of my readers, probably... maybe... we'll see.

Oh, quick sidenote, somewhere in my absence I hit over 10,000 page views. Here is a celebration gif or two. I guess I probably owe it to you or something.

On the continued subject of my faces,
dis my lady gettin' face

Okay, last one. It's been a while, I've missed this

Right, without further procrastination, Big. Hero. Six!

Let me just start out by saying, I was incredibly apprehensive about this film. I watched a documentary about the phenomenal success of a little movie I also reviewed, maybe you've heard of it, Frozen? At the end of this documentary Disney took the opportunity to plug their upcoming film Big Hero 6. Paul Briggs, head of story for Frozen, puts it thusly:

"Frozen is a story about sisters, and the relationship between those sisters and the journey they go on, and with Big Hero 6 you have a relationship with brothers." 

Other people involved say things on voiceover along the lines of "Its a boy and his robot, it's different to frozen but the strength of relationship is still in there" and "It's a fun superhero film bt there's also a familial relationship angle which is so important". 

And I'm sitting there with my face firmly in my palm thinking, holy shit, are they really saying this is original? Did they take none of the feminist praise of the film to heart? They can't honestly believe that the idea they're pitching is original...can they?

I mean: 

and

This one kinda counts as both a relationship between brothers AND a boy and his robot.
They share a lot of common elements with the BahR conventions (and yes, that was a pun)

(If you're interested there's an entire Tv Trops page dedicated to "Boy and his X" media. There are so many robot and boy duos on there, holy shitballs.)

To summarise my laboured point, a boy and his robot is not an original idea. Japan LOVES that trope. A boy and his brother is not an original idea, if not actual blood relations the buddy cop film/show is the modern equivalent to the "sworn brothers" trope in medieval era romance and the like. These are far from fresh ideas. The success of Frozen was in having arguably two female protagonists and treating them both like people (because Hollywood has a problem with not treating women like a homogeneous group for some reason). 

You cannot say  "This female driven thing was successful, I wonder if trying it with guys would also be successful?" There is no way anyone is so naive. So, I did not have high hopes for this film. Thankfully, it took the idea in a totally different direction. Here on there be spoilers so watch your back.

I liked Big Hero 6. It's a fun movie. But it has some gaping problems that really should have been spotted and remedied. Butt first, ima talk about the strengths. This film is great for minority and gender representation. Among the team of six superheroes there is only one (human) white dude. In fact, I almost there WAS a white dude on the team because he looks like this when suited up:

Spot him? No? He's in the dragon suit.

I barely count it at all to be completely honest. Apart from generic skater, nerdy white guy we have two distinct female characters; Gogo (yellow suit) the adrenaline junkie purple hair "cool" chick and Honey Lemon (pink suit) the unabashedly feminine but also really smart science girl. Then we have Wasabi (green suit) a large black man who is obsessed with planning, precision and order, and Hiro Hamada (purple suit) fourteen year old genius, trouble maker and team leader. Baymax (or, as I refer to him in my head, Bae-max) is in red and he's a robot so he doesn't have a sex though his designated gender is male. I'll probably rant on the gendering of robots some other day. It bothers me. But I'm not about to go off on a tangent right now. 

The colourful and creative cast of characters is well done and doesn't lean too heavily on stereotypes (with perhaps the exceptions of Hiro and Gogo, but I'll get back to that), and all of the voice actors are actually representative of the characters they play; Hiro, his brother and Gogo are played by Asian voice actors, Wasabi a black actor and Honey Lemon Hispanic (it's not made particularly clear while watching the film but I think Honey Lemon is supposed to be Hispanic or have some Hispanic genes. She has a slight accent at times and a tan but it's never referenced explicitly. For the most part, she's white passing.) Hiro and his brother Tadashi are also mixed race, they live with their aunt who is white after their parents died (this particular snippet of information revealed to us in the most wonderful piece of clumsy exposition I've heard in a long time; 

Hiro frustratedly yelling at Tadashi "They died when I was three, remember?!?").

I'll admit, I was a little annoyed at just how white the Hiro looked, having an Asian american lead in a modern Disney film would be amazing as there haven't been any in their films since Mulan in 1998, almost twenty years ago. Yes, there was Jake Long in the tv series American Dragon and some argue that Russel from Up looks vaguely Asian but that's not at all clear. Big Hero 6 is set in the futuristic San Fransokio, (a mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo). Explicit references are made to Asian culture and technology. I understand that San Francisco and Tokyo merging into a megacity is about intermingling, the "melting pot" principle and all that but could they seriously not have had them live with an Asian american relative? Did they have to establish that they had a white parent implicitly as a weird sort of racial "no homo" equivalent (I'm not even gonna try to coin a terms for that phenomenon, I'm sticking with "racial no homo"). I highly doubt it was unconscious. I'm disappointed that our protagonists still need to be at least a little white in order for film producers to feel comfortable with it.

Hiro as a character suffers from a major case of "Protagonist traits". You know the ones. He's young and skilled but arrogant and reckless, but in the end he's going to pull together to lead the team to victory. Ash from Pokemon has this. Naruto. TJ from Recess. Most Red Power Rangers. Luke Skywalker. Harry Potter in the early books. The writers gave Hiro the most generic traits available and it just feels lazy. I swear I was expecting a scene like this:

It doesn't get much more clichéd...

Then there's Gogo. In general I felt like the supporting cast could have been given more screen time but in a 100 minute film things do need to get cut (and I'm satisfied with the amount of time given to Bae-max so I'll let it slide mostly). However, Gogois probably the least developed character in the supporting cast. She likes to go fast and also she's "cool". I honestly question whether the creators saw The Lego Movie (which I will review eventually, I promise) because Gogo is EXACTLY the kind of character Wildstyle was satirising.

You can tell she's the "cool" one because she wears leather and has a coloured streak in her hair. She's sarcastic and she doesn't care what you think. Did I mention she chews bubble gum constantly?

Yeeeeeeah... it's laughably clichéd and played DEAD STRAIGHT.

I love picturing the Big Hero 6 design team, halfway through their movie, sitting down to check out The Lego Movie and collectively having it dawn on them that their oh-so-original character design is so common that it was canonically thought up by an eight year old in one of the most popular movies of the previous year. Followed by a collective, "Well, shit."

Character qualms aside, the other large problem with this film is pacing. Don't get me wrong, some scenes are done really well. The first scene with the bot battle hustling, the scene where Bae-max is on low battery (seriously, click that link,it's wonderful), some of the emotional hard hitters early on and then near the end of the film are beautifully paced. However, much of the rest feels incredibly rushed.

The most gaping case of this is the twist villain. (Spoiler Warning here on in) Because Frozen did it, Big Hero 6 need a twist villain, sense-making be damned! Alas, where Frozen spent a decent amount of time establishing Hans (their well executed twist villain) as a character, the twist villain for Big Hero 6, professor Callaghan, gets a measly two scenes of introduction and development, and short scenes at that. What do we know about him, really? We know he invented the technology that Hiro uses for his battle bot. We know that he works for the university at which Tadashi studies, and that he serves as some kind of mentor figure. We also establish that he has a problem with Alistair "Big Business, that shit" Krei profiting from scientific discoveries (You know, because scientists don't need funding or anything silly like that). Other than that, we're given very little set up to the big reveal that, shock horror, Callaghan is actually the man behind the mask.

A much better twist would have been
"Hey, Ammon escaped from the Avatar universe and is wreaking havoc in other worlds!"

It turns out that Callaghan's daughter was the test driver for a teleportation machine which wasn't ready for human trials. It worked perfectly fine for other things but put a person through and explodey-chaos-not-good-stuff happened and she was trapped/killed. Callaghan, despite being perfectly fine with the test before it went ahead, blames his daughter's disappearance and probable death on Krei and his greed and steals Hiro's science project, commits arson on his place of work and allows a promising student of his to die, all to enact his vaguely thought through revenge plot. 

It's... super contrived, is what I'm trying to say. 

For comparison's sake, let's take a look at another "promising scientist turns villain" example: Doctor Otto Octavian AKA Doc Ock. In Sam Raimi's Spiderman 2, Octavian plays a similar mentor role to Peter as Callaghan does to Tadashi. He also loses a loved one (his wife) in a scientific experiment gone wrong and goes on to wreak havoc on the city. The difference? It's established that the mechanical octopus arms are connected to the Doctor's cerebral stem and that the inhibitor chip has broken. In English: they cause him to go mad. There is no such clause in Callaghan's case. Now, it is unclear how long it's been since the accident, how long he's had to mull over what's happened and let the hatred and lust for vengeance ferment, but I'd wager it wasn't long, considering that Abigail does get saved in the end (spoilers and stuff). 

I also find it really hard to believe that a grown ass man would have such a rash reaction to this. Yes, grief is powerful, but it's hardly "throw your entire life away for revenge" powerful. The idea that someone could turn violent and murderous over the loss of a loved one is supposed to be one of the central themes of the film. Hiro, after reprogramming Bae-max to turn them into a fighter robot, tries to have them kill Callaghan on learning his identity. Then later, when we figure out Callaghan's motivation, it's supposed to be a parallel with Hiro's reaction. 

But this doesn't work. Hiro is a hormonal fourteen year old boy. The testosterone is pumping. He's been brought up on movies and video games which teach that violence is a rational reaction to pain. He doesn't yet have the life experience to know that this isn't feasible. He's been established as naive, this all makes sense for his character. It doesn't make sense for Callaghan, who is forty years or so his senior. Callaghan flat out would not react like this because he's not a teenage boy. He's a grown man. He would probably call in the lawyers. No one wants to see that in a kid's action movie, but that's what would happen.

To finish on a more positive but still related note, I like how this film deals with masculinity. I've already mentioned how I like the gender representation. Three central female characters in a cast of ten or eleven is pretty good for modern Hollywood (I do feel like saying that is a cop out, letting Hollywood away with a lot but it does show progress. If this film was made five years ago I'd wager we'd get one or two and they wouldn't share any scenes. Maybe I'm lapping up table scraps but it's a step in the right direction at least). Callaghan plot contrivances aside, I like the different types of masculinity we see here. Hiro is the stereotypical, emotionally inexpressive, proud teenage boy. Tadashi is a much better rounded character. He cares openly about his brother, about his friends, about his studies, and about people in general. He builds Bae-max, a comprehensive healthcare robot, to help people. Tadashi is a great example of modern, moderate masculinity. He is the other side of the coin to Hiro's insecure bravado. Wasabi and Fred are similar examples of modern men. Wasabi likes order but he is not made a constant punchline for it, where in other media he might be (*cough* Big Bang Theory *cough cough*). Fred is a comic book loving slacker (who comes from old money..?) who, like Tadashi, is unashamed and unridiculed for loving what he loves and being himself. Hiro is young and shown as a stark contrast to these older men, secure in their own interests and masculinity. 

Then there's Bae-max themselves (By the way, I'm using gender neutral pronouns for Bae-max. I'm anti-robot-gendering). Bae-max is the voice of reason for Hiro, a sort of continuation of Tadashi's calming presence after his death. Bae-max, being a robot, is free of the social constraints imposed upon men and boys by our society. They have no shame in discussing the tough issues, like puberty, and they recognise the healing effect of a good hug. They have a surprising human reaction to the violence that Hiro wants from them, rejecting it as toxic and ultimately futile. And they're adorable. Did I mention they're adorable? Because they are. Very. Cute.

Overall, Big Hero 6 is worth a watch, for the characters if not the plot. And it's always great to see women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields represented in kid's movies. Though this film is overwhelmingly male centred it's fantastic to see this generation growing up watching movies where female scientists aren't even a question. I was pleased that there wasn't a "...for a girl" to be heard in the whole running time. Hiro even gets told to "Girl up", an interesting subversion by our "cool girl", Gogo.  Check it out if you have the time.

Embrace the madness.