Critics reviews

To craft an engaging, exciting family adventure complete with tender life lessons and a merch-friendly cuddly robot pal is one thing. To maintain corporate creative synergy across generation gaps? That's the familiar Disney magic, right there.

Merely watching Big Hero 6 feels inadequate. It does something synesthetic. It's true that I didn't see it in 3-D, but I'm not sure getting closer to the images would have kept me from trying to leap through the screen. This movie is so energetically fulgent and steroidally sweet that watching it is basically like losing your mind in the drug-store candy aisle.

[Its] considerable graces as an animated film—its fantastical layouts and bouncy sense of figure and motion—are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate superhero flick. The movie is imaginative in its handling of Baymax and its Japanese-American near-future setting, and derivative in most other respects. Ultimately, it sacrifices something unique and poignant in favor of the kind of loud, instantly forgettable team-effort showdown familiar from countless Marvel movies of the past decade.

Based on a lesser-known Marvel comic, Disney's Big Hero 6 is an exciting and touching — at times, a little too touching — tale of families both real and surrogate. But wait, those who've seen the trailer might ask. Isn't this that funny action cartoon with the giant, poofy robot? Well, yes, and therein lies part of the dissonance with this often-wonderful, deceptively strange movie. You could get emotional whiplash watching it.

Happily, as filmmakers, Hall and Williams do see things from different angles. They envision a teleportation device as a kaleidoscope of fractals—the film's Day-Glo-to-gunmetal spectrum breaks up into turbulent blasts of colors. They exploit all the elements of film to deliver thrills and laughs, whether with the punk's-eye view of the opening bot fights or the witty displays of what Baymax sees in diagnostic mode—the wiliest demonstration of technovision since The Terminator.

Before all the story stuff gets in the way, "Big Hero 6" hums along on the imaginativeness of its visual design and the image of a big squeaky toy navigating city streets with Oliver Hardy roly-polyness and the deadpan of Buster Keaton.

There's enough tried-and-true Disney sentiment here to counter the rampant antihumanism, and the futuristic settings look spectacular, but this left me feeling gross.

The film is unsubtle in its didactic agenda of teaching kids to speak and stay active with friends, rather than indulge in violent vengeance. It's a fine lesson that's broadly examined through on-the-nose dialogue, and these cheap morals plague the entirety of this funny, engaging, but hugely unfocused film, which feels overstuffed with storylines from the get-go.