I’d been curious about Big Hero Six since I started seeing concept art nearly a year ago as the first joint Marvel/Disney’s joint project since Disney’s purchase of Marvel comics. I’d been skeptical about it of course. I especially had mixxed feelings about moving the concept from Japan to this strange fusion of Tokyo and San Francisco the bit that stuck in my mind was reimagining the Golden Gate Bridge with red
torii gates.
To be honest I had no idea what to expect. You have to be a REAL comic book nerd to have even heard of Big Hero 6 they were sort of a Japanese Avengers created to make the Marvel Universe seem more international as well as a way to use existing characters Silver Samurai and Sunfire. They pretty much consisted of a collection of anime cliches and the way the American public perceives Japanese popular culture. It never really impressed me.
So I went in knowing they were going to change everything (they pretty much had to since they didn’t have access to Sunfire and Silver Samurai) And pretty much went to see something where everything but the names were changed.
For the most part I really enjoyed it the city of “San Fransokyo” was fairly well realized with the Asian Fusion pervading everything. I liked the concept design and for the most part I enjoyed the voice acting (my favorite was
Maya Rudolph as the main character’s aunt.) and the action and the comedy was right up on the usual level of quality I expect from these kinds of movies.
But despite enjoying it, I’m afraid it didn’t hold up very well to the usual nitpicking. As a fan of comic book movies I’m getting very tired of the mandatory origin story. It’s getting to the point where I find myself needing these movies to have a sequel not because I want one because the sequel is the real movie with the interesting plot and events. Because of this most of these movies as good as they frequently are suffer. By the time they get though all of the mandatory exposition their really isn’t any time for all of the other stuff. Because of this as good as the action scenes were it wasn’t what it could have been. (on a similar note I hate it when there’s only one villain in team titles. Even if that villain is more powerful than the whole team put together it still feels like the heroes are ganging up on the villain.
Then there are the plot holes. The biggest one that stuck out for me was as follows. If the villain is using the technology that he stole from the hero to the point he didn’t change the frequency of the control why didn’t the hero just make a new remote control and shut the whole thing down?
But other than those little things I enjoyed this movie quite a bit.
The last couple of bike rides had not been my best. First there had been my frustrating ride in the rain last week. Then there was Monday where a combination of being just a little wiped out because I had gone to the movies in Northgate and then had to go back when I realized I’d dropped my lock on the way out. So in the end I’d ridden enough so I really didn’t need my Monday work out.
