osprey_archer | Big Hero 6

It’s always interesting to see a movie on the small screen after seeing it for the first time in theaters. I’ve noticed that my small-screen reactions are almost always more muted, perhaps not so much by the size of the screen as the size of the audience, although of course there is also the inescapable difference between seeing a movie for the first time and watching it again.

All this is a roundabout way to say that I recently rewatched Big Hero 6, which made me weep like a baby in theaters back in the day, and I didn’t weep like a baby this time.

It’s still a good movie, though. I love all the detail that the filmmakers put into the setting of San Fransokyo (the wind turbines which float above the city, decorated like fish and kites, are perhaps my favorite detail), and the story is a lot of fun. In some ways it feels that they’re taking a second run at some of the themes in Meet the Robinsons: the brilliant young scientist, still a kid, who meets a group of incredibly cool, smart people that he yearns to join.

In Big Hero 6, he actually does get to join this group (in fact, turns them into a group of superheroes!), which is part of the reason why Big Hero 6 is a more satisfying movie. The other reason, IMO, is that it’s less convoluted. Meet the Robinsons is forever getting lost in the weeds, while Big Hero 6, at its core, the story is about Hiro coping with his grief for his brother’s death, in fact coming to terms with the inevitability of loss in human life. Although the plot is of course much more complicated than that, the filmmakers never lose sight of that heart.

Also, Baymax, your personal healthcare companion, is one of the great comic sidekicks of film. The part where Hiro teaches him to fist-bump and make an explosion sound afterward and Baymax turns that noise to “ba-la-LA-la”? Classic.