Big Hero 6

I've seen all five of the nominees for the 2015 Best Animated Feature, and I found the winner, Big Hero 6, to be the weakest. Oh, it's acceptable fare, the perfect place to put a kid in front of the screen or TV, and there's nothing bad about it. But I thought it was not terribly original and even derivative of much better movies.

Set in San Fransokyo, a hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo (which allows for easy mixing of Japanese and other races), it concerns Hiro Hamada, a 14-year old genius who is wasting his talent on "bot-fighting," a kind of cockfighting except with robots. His older brother Tadashi urges him to see his college robotics lab (why it took him so long is a mystery) where Hiro sees all sorts of amazing things done by Tadashi's friends. He wants in.

To get in, he has to invent something amazing, so he does, introducing microbots, little robots that when in a group ask as a colony, controlled by neural transmitter--you think it, it becomes it. A head of a conglomerate wants to buy it, but Tadashi's professor urges him not to. Then there is a tragic fire, and Hiro forgets about his robots.

Later, he will rediscover Tadashi's project, Baymax, a "healthcare companion" who looks like the Michelin Man. He can scan a body and prescribe remedies, but assists Hiro in finding what became of his microbots--they are controlled by a villainous man in a Kabuki mask. Together with Tadashi's friends, they use their technical know-how to form a superhero group and defeat the villain.

Like I said, nothing wrong with this, but nothing transcendent, either. The superhero stuff reminded me of The Incredibles, a far superior film, and the "boy and his robot" thing has been done to death, starting way back with Will Robinson in Lost in Space. The design of Baymax is at least different--he's vinyl and white, much like a beanbag chair.

The messages of the film aren't very sophisticated--don't kill someone out of revenge, mostly, and the ending sets up an obvious sequel or three. This is the first combo of Walt Disney and Marvel and it feels corporate to its bones.

I would rank the Animated Film category thusly: Song of the Sea, The Boxtrolls, How to Train Your Dragon 2, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and then Big Hero 6. But none of the them match The Lego Movie, so this year's award is one of the most outrageous in recent memory.