Hairy Baby: BIG HERO 6

by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor

History has taught us heroes can come in all shapes, sizes and hues, but who would have thought inflatable?

Disney’s latest offering Big Hero 6 is loosely based on a Japanese-style comic strip. It features Hiro (voice of Ryan Potter), a 13 year-old genius who’s already eligible for college, but thinks that’s a waste of time, when he’s already making big bank entering robot battle competitions with a seemingly innocuous floppy looking bot, which completely destroys the competition. Talk about a ringer!

Hiro’s brother Tadashi (voice of Daniel Henney) uses a little older brother reverse psychology to get his little brother to want to earn a place at this fictional MIT type higher learning institute, and puts him to the task of creating something that will blow all the competition away at the annual Tech convention, where 1st prize is acceptance into the program.

It works a little too well, as Hiro’s invention becomes worth killing over and it’s up to him, a robot created by Tadashi to be an inflatable “Florence Nightingale”, Baymax, and a bunch of scientist geeks to transform into superheroes to save the day!

I gotta say, the movie works. Directors Don Hall & Chris Williams / Jordan Roberts (screenplay) & Don Hall (story) have hit that middle ground of what kids will tune into and what parents won’t tune out. It’s not quite as much zany fun as this summer’s blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy (click for T&T post) but it gives you that same theme of rooting for a bunch of misfits coming together to bring the best and the worst of themselves to fight a common foe. And Baymax is almost as lovably annoying and wonderfully weird as Galaxy’s Groot. – Le Anne Lindsay, Editor

T &T’s LAMB Score: 4 outta 5

Around the Web

Drawing by: H.A.N.E. Works posted to ex.blast.tumbler.com

The Challenge Of ‘Big Hero 6’: How To Make A Huggable Robot

At Carnegie Mellon, Hall scored when he met Atkeson, a professor at the
school’s Robotics Institute. “I have a colleague here who explicitly
designs huggable robots,” says Atkeson… Just what a guy from Disney wants to hear. Hall says Atkeson told him that, as a scientist, he was frustrated that most movies featuring robots were about technology run amok. “And he kept saying, ‘When is somebody going to put a robot on screen that can be the hero? When are we going to get that?’ ” (That’s when Hall told Atkeson he had him at “inflatable.”) READ MORE Elizabeth Blair NPR All Tech Considered

Food in Film

Big Hero 6 is preceded by the most adorable Foodie animated short, called FEAST featuring a stray puppy who becomes his owners eating companion, until the owner starts dating a vegetarian. It’s really cute!