#WTW Glance: Big Hero 6

Glance*: Big Hero 6

(2014, Don Hall/Chris Williams; Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment disc and streaming)

Big Hero 6 performed well with both audiences and the Academy (winning Best Animated Feature for 2014). There’s a lot about it to like: the focus on Asian-American main characters; the use of the great Scott Adsit (late of 30 Rock) as the voice of Baymax; some wonderful animation, especially of the microbots that furnish the primary plot device (their tidal wave-like motions recall The Lego Movie in that each film animates block-like parts into complex structures at high speeds); and a surprisingly heavy story about making a new family when you’ve lost your own. But a non-fankid viewer can’t help but see some liabilities as well, many centered around story tropes and beats that are less than original. As an origin tale for a to-be crime-fighting collective (the titular 6), the innovations of hero Hiro and lovable robot Baymax are undercut by the rest of the team’s stock juveniles from Central Casting (at times uncomfortably reminiscent of a 1970’s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series): There’s Fred, the funny one; he’s a comic book fan, the college mascot, and turns out (in the post-credits) to be the son of a costumed superhero; GoGo, who is tough, Asian, and “modelled on a bike messenger” per director Don Hall (a tough Asian bike messenger like Y.T. from Neal Stephenson’s seminal Snow Crash from 1982, perhaps?**); Honey Lemon, the chemist, described (of course) as a “mad scientist,” and the team’s quirky member; and Wasabi, who’s black, cautious, and neurotic — each one feels like a cliché, at least in the tiny bit of screen time they’re allotted, and less time still is allowed for Hiro’s guardian Aunt Cass (voiced by Maya Rudolph). The film winds up feeling as if it’s missing more elements than it provides. For parents in the audience, some of the thinness of characterization is mitigated — or, for the cynical, papered over — by early plot points that are highly emotional and difficult, like the deaths that kick off both Finding Nemo and Up.

With all that said, pro and con, the movie’s breakout relationship is between Hiro and the medical robot Baymax, who proves to be an excellent foil. As his older brother Tadashi’s invention and dream project, Baymax represents a lost relationship for Hiro, but not as a simple brother substitute — instead Hiro respects and emulates Tadashi’s passion while adding his own innovations to his brother’s (literally; the gentle medical robot purposely given a balloon body to protect human patients becomes a fearsome combatant when he’s outfitted with Hiro’s battle skin and software). These scenes of exploration, discovery, and an actual friendship are what make the movie worthwhile; it's just a shame that 100 minutes doesn't have room for similarly detailed development of the flesh and blood friendships as well.

Reminds me of:

Hmm, other than Hanna-Barbera from the "limited animation" era? I do like the university research lab as an originating source for Tadashi and his friends; that has a bit of a Dead Poet’s Society or latter Harry Potter-ish vibe. Actually, there should be more stories set in graduate school research labs; as a team using pure brains and invention to fight crime, the Big Hero 6 team members could contribute to a STEM revolution.

But then — the guilt!

In terms of guilt, the overinflated and elephantine Baymax in the room is my lack of enthusiasm for this strong performer. I'm at odds with my spouse, who saw it in the theater with our youngest and was enchanted by it. She and I were in theaters together 11 years ago for The Incredibles (the kids were too young then); our mutual love for that work was not repeated here. There's a family focus in both movies (coming together in Incredibles; reacting to loss and building your own community in 6) which she may have responded to; for me, the intricate superheroes-among-us backstory of Incredibles was fascinating in 2004, like a Watchmen specifically designed for kids and in some ways superior for it.*** So I wish I liked Big Hero 6 more, but I certainly will watch a sequel or try out a series version if either appears in the future, and will especially be hoping that the four remaining members of the six get an equal focus.

Pitch:

This is unquestionably a handsomely animated film with an appealing lead and an innovative main relationship; it's more than worth a spin with young fans.

* For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.

** Not only is Honey Lemon a riff on Stephenson’s Y.T., but the lead character of Snow Crash is also named Hiro. (His full name is Hiro Protagonist, proving that Stephenson has some Thomas Pynchon level of breezy sarcasm.)

*** I'm comparing Incredibles the film to Watchmen the book; I have no desire to watch the 2009 film version of Watchmen. I can practically re-read my copy of the graphic novel instead in the same 160+ minutes, with “Tales of the Black Freighter” intact.

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#WTW: Alice (Něco z Alenky)

(#WhatThomWatched eight!)

Alice (Něco z Alenky)

(Jan Svankmajer, 1988; English version disc from First Run Features)

Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are well known, and IMDb lists at least 60 movie adaptations of one or the other, counting shorts and spoofs. So what are the defining parameters of Jan Svankmajer’s version? Alice is portrayed by an actual little girl, Kristýna Kohoutová; she is the only human in the movie. Her voice (Camilla Power in the English language version) narrates the film, and all attributions (“she said”/”said the White Rabbit”) are spoken by her lips in closeup. All of the creatures she meets in Wonderland are dolls (or other anthropomorphized objects), usually stop-motion animated. And in a brilliantly natural choice, Alice herself becomes a doll when she shrinks.

Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist genius. His inspired retelling of Alice does not reproduce much of the specific wordplay in the books, preserving just a few of the puns and none of the poetry; only a handful of the famous characters appear, all from the first book (none from Through the Looking-Glass); Alice’s long and digressive internal monologues are cut; and the most-repeated symbols are Svankmajer additions (desks with drawers with knobs that break off, to pick a notable example). But his is truly a transcendent Alice: she is a child, capturing precisely the stubborn unpleasantness of the literary Alice, and she is caught in a nightmare, or day-dreaming nightmarish things, or a measure of each. There is nothing cute about Alice in Carroll; he pushed any of the Victorian preciousness demanded by the readers of his day off of her and off the thoroughly unlikable creatures she meets and onto himself — consider: the syrupy-sickly-sweet parts of Alice come in the little poems (the Liddel poems) and the prefaces he writes in his own voice, almost as if by pouring all of his sentiment out on the real Liddel sisters (and, in letters, on all the child-fans in his life), he can treat the fictive Alice with cold detachment and (via the Queens, both Red and Of Hearts) cruelty. Svankmajer puts this on screen like no other filmmaker. His Alice, and her predicaments, and her treatment at the hands of Wonderland’s denizens, all channel Carroll.

Reminds me of:

I am very serious about Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll. Early in my DVD-collecting days, I started creating informal D-I-Y sets of related movies, and the first one was an attempt to get every version of Alice released on disc at that time (which wasn’t too terribly hard — I believe there were seven, including the Disney cartoon.) I own multiple editions of the book including the two invaluable Martin Gardner Annotated Alice volumes. This is my favorite movie version. For all that it deviates from the books’ familiar set pieces, it captures Alice — more, it creates a cinematic equivalent — to a degree that more literal visualizations do not.

This is one of those movies that creates the protagonist’s dream world out of a clutter of objects scattered around the “real” world; the next example that comes readily to my mind is another mature-movie-masquerading-as-child-fare, Gilliam’s Time Bandits (in which Kevin’s not-dream can be seen to have been constructed out of toys and images in his room). All of Alice’s Wonderland starts in a dreary, paint-peeling, ruin of a room strewn with Richter Anchor Stone blocks (a 19th-century German building toy which my kids also played with) and a taxidermied rabbit in a glass case; she then plunges into and through and past and out of a series of such rooms, with elements repeated and reused. Some of these items seemed to hail from my own dreams, some from other movies — I realize there is a limited vocabulary of clutter-y objects, but the cases of mounted butterflies instantly conjured another Czech surrealist masterpiece, Vera Chytilová's Daisies (Sedmikrásky).

But then — the guilt!

Alice was Svankmajer’s first feature-length movie after years of critically acclaimed shorts. But it was just a warm-up for several subsequent full-lengths, some also based on classical source material and some just from his own imagination, none of which I’ve seen. It actually takes me some time to work up the guts to experience his nightmarish visions, but I’ve got to seek out these more recent films on disc — especially Lesson Faust, his take on the Faust legend, and Lunacy, about an insane asylum.

I’ve also never even bothered with Tim Burton’s Disney rewrite from 2010, despite being impressed with actress Mia Wasikowska (in movies like Jane Eyre) and (usually) liking a Burton production at least for its visual sense. Correction: I tried to watch it once and turned it off after twenty stultifying minutes. Not a whit of what makes these books so vital had made it to the screen; where Carroll’s obnoxious seven-year-old is the heart of both Alice’s darkly humorous edge and the perfect foil for his nonsense logic, the "grown-up" version makes nonsense of his nonsense. I guess my Alice collection will never be complete . . . . and now that I think about it, I don’t feel guilty in the least.

Pitch:

That rabbit. Glass eyes were never so unnerving. Between this and Donnie Darko, it's a wonder that anyone can keep a pet rabbit in the house and still sleep at night.

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