'Big Hero 6': Disney brings little-known Marvel stars to big screen 

\'Big Hero 6\': Disney brings little-known Marvel stars to big screen

Directors of the animated movie "Big Hero 6" Don Hall (R) and Chris Williams pose for a portrait at Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California September 29, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

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BURBANK, Calif. – They’re going to have to build an extension onto the Marvel universe soon. ’Cause it’s starting to get awfully crowded in there.

This week, Marvel Studios took the wraps off a roster of films hitting theatres from 2016 through 2019, a list that includes a two-part Avengers 3, Captain America pitted against Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War, and the introduction of cinematic newcomers Doctor Strange, Black Panther, the female Captain Marvel and a lesser-known super-group called the Inhumans.

But while some of these heroes might not be household names outside of comic book fandom, there’s a group of even more obscure Marvel champions making their premiere this week in Disney’s Big Hero 6. And it’s not likely this team will ever be facing down Thanos or picking sides in a superhero grudge match.

In fact, some folks at Marvel had never even heard of Big Hero 6, a Japanese super-group that first appeared in a 1998 Marvel limited series and has popped up occasionally in other comics, most recently in a 2012 issue of Amazing Spider-Man.

The folks at Marvel “were pretty thrilled we picked Big Hero 6,” says Don Hall, who co-directs the computer-animated film with Chris Williams. Thrilled, and maybe a little surprised. “Even they were, ‘I did not see that coming.’ They may have done a little head scratching at the beginning.”

Big Hero 6 is the story of Hiro Hamada, a 14-year-old robotics whiz who inherits a ’bot called Baymax from his older brother. When Hiro (voiced by teen actor Ryan Potter) discovers a supervillain threatening his city, he forms a superhero squad with his rotund white robot (30 Rock’s Scott Adsit) and his new science-savvy friends: GoGo Tomago (Jamie Chung), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.) and Fred (Silicon Valley’s T.J. Miller).

Big Hero 6 marks the first time the chocolate and peanut butter of Marvel and Disney have been so thoroughly mashed up. When the Walt Disney Company bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009, acquiring the rights to a wide pantheon of heroes (with the notable exceptions of Spider-Man and the X-Men), they handed the live-action filmmaking duties to capable directors like Joss Whedon, who made 2012’s The Avengers a billion-dollar blockbuster.

But with Big Hero 6, Walt Disney Animation Studios – the gang behind Wreck-It Ralph and last year’s monster hit Frozen – are getting their mitts on Marvel superheroes for the first time. It all stems from a conversation Hall had with Disney and Pixar animation boss John Lasseter, in which Hall said he’d love his next project to take advantage of the new nuptials between Disney and Marvel.

Hall, who directed 2011’s Winnie the Pooh, knew there were certain Marvel properties that were going to be completely off limits. “The Avengers hadn’t even come out yet, but Iron Man had. And you knew they were doing Captain America, and you knew they were doing Thor... (we had to) stay away from the big dogs. So I was trying to think of stuff that was a little more obscure that maybe we could do.”

Hall pitched five ideas to Disney, and Big Hero 6 got the green light. Unfortunately for the curious among us, co-director Chris Williams (Bolt) says they’re not talking about what the other four pitches were. “I feel like as far as Marvel goes, as far as Disney goes, as far as we go, it feels better to just stay away from that,” he says.

Working with such little-known comic book heroes gave Hall, Williams and their team the leeway to tinker and tweak as they saw fit. In the comics, Big Hero 6 is an Avengers-like government agency based in Tokyo, and Baymax is considerably more frightening in appearance than the cuddly, blobby ’bot in the movie.

And despite a fleeting cameo from a figure very well known to the Marvel universe, the directors were assured that they needn’t to try to shoehorn Big Hero 6 into the same world as Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and their pals, says Williams. “They said, ‘Don’t be worried about setting it in our universe. You don’t need to be encumbered by that. We would love to see what you guys do with this and create your own universe.’”

“We were taking the characters’ names and the title, and that was always about the extent of it,” says Hall. “Once we created San Fransokyo” – the movie’s wild melding of San Francisco and Tokyo, home to Hiro and his friends – “this lived in its own world. And the origin story of this team had to come organically out of the story of this main character.”

Whether Big Hero 6 will be a catalyst for more Disney-animated superhero movies remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: we don’t need to wait until 2019 for the next galaxy of Marvel stars.

It’s not all princess roles for Disney girls these days

Are the days of the delicate Disney princess over? Looks like they might be. And that’s not a bad thing.

From Rapunzel in Tangled to Sgt. Calhoun in Wreck-it Ralph to Elsa and Anna in Frozen – along with many of their sisters over on the Pixar side –female characters in Disney’s most recent animated movies are evolving with audiences’ desires for more relatable and self-reliant heroines.

Or as Big Hero 6’s GoGo Tomago might say to the old-timey Disney princesses: “Stop whining. Woman up.”

“I do see a shift. So I’m pretty happy about it,” says Jamie Chung, who voices scientist-turned-superhero GoGo in Disney’s adaptation of the little-known Marvel comic, about a boy, his robot and their team of technology-powered champions.

“Instead of a damsel in distress, it’s two sisters in Frozen, for example. And the prince, who you think is there to save her, turns out to be, you know...”

“The bad guy,” says Genesis Rodriguez, who voices Big Hero 6’s chemistry whiz Honey Lemon. “Um, spoiler.”

Like many of us, the 31-year-old Chung (Sucker Punch, The Hangover Part II) and 27-year-old Rodriguez (Hours, Tusk) grew up on Disney movies. “When I saw (The Little Mermaid’s) Ariel for the first time, I started combing my hair with a fork,” says Rodriguez. “My mother had to stop me in restaurants.”

But they’re both pleased and proud to be in a movie where the superheroes are all science nerds, and two of them are women. GoGo constructs a super-suit with wheels built into the feet, allowing her to move at lightning speed. Honey Lemon builds a purse that can be programmed to dispense any chemical composition at the press of a button. (Yeah, a purse. Some stereotypes persist. But it’s also the weapon of choice used by the comic book character.)

“I had my favourite Disney princesses and characters, but we have really positive and beautiful female characters in this movie that we’re leaving for another generation of girls. It’s just a wonderful blessing,” says Rodriguez. “If we can inspire girls to not be afraid to be the one answering the question first in class... those are beautiful messages that you can give to a woman, that they can accomplish anything.”

Chung knows her away around superpowers and Disney heroines – she was the steely pilot Amber in director Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, and plays Mulan in Disney-owned ABC’s Once Upon a Time. Rodriguez, meanwhile… well, she used to build actual robots. Which would fight other robots. For real.

“That was in high school. We had an all-girls robotics team,” says Rodriguez, who worked on welding and pneumatics. “Because we were an all-girls team, they didn\'t expect us to kick their butts.”

Their first robot was a spinning instrument of destruction, and the second was sort of like a crocodile, she says. “It would come in at an angle, knock you out and chomp you to death.”

And what of Chung’s robot-building skills? “I built, like, birdhouses in high school,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t do anything cool like that.”

Once upon a time, in the faraway kingdom of California, the evil forces of Creative Stagnation and Advancing Technology tried to do the unthinkable: kill Disney animation forever.

But like a certain plucky, never-say-die mouse, Disney refused to give up. And slowly but surely, the last decade or so has seen Disney’s legendary animation studio go from a struggling also-ran to a contender that can once again stand among the animation titans, including sister studio Pixar.

With the much buzzed-about Big Hero 6 hitting theatres Friday, here’s a look back at the last several years of Walt Disney Animation Studios films.

Disney’s first fully computer-animated feature tells the story of a nerdy chicken who takes on an alien invasion. It broke a box-office slump for Disney animation, tying with The Lion King as Disney’s biggest opening weekend for an animated movie.

A science-savvy orphan builds a device to help locate the mother who abandoned him, only to meet a quirky family in the future. It didn’t do as well as Chicken Little at the box office, but had more favourable reviews.

With the voices of John Travolta and Miley Cyrus, Disney’s third computer-animated feature got solid reviews and is considered a turning point in Disney’s latest animation renaissance.

Disney went back to its classic animation roots and produced the studio’s first black princess in this tale of love and voodoo magic in New Orleans. It was a moderate box office success.

Switching again to computer animation for this musical retelling of Rapunzel, Disney landed a commercial and critical hit and earned a Grammy award for the song I See the Light.

Revisiting the story of everyone’s favourite honey-obsessed bear proved to be a hit with critics, but was destroyed at the box office by the final Harry Potter film. This could end up being Disney’s last traditionally animated feature film for years to come.

Set inside a video game world with cameos from many classic game characters, this one was second only to Tangled as Disney’s highest-grossing animated movie in the post-Lion King era.

In case there was any lingering doubt that Disney animation was back, Frozen settled it by becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and won Disney its first Oscar in the recently created best animated feature category. Plus, every other little girl dressed as Elsa for Halloween.

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