Brief Review: Big Hero 6

I've been anxious to see this movie ever since I saw the teaser trailer back in May. I look forward to just about anything put out by Disney or Pixar, but this one in particular really spoke to my sensibilities.

Robots. Superheroes. Futuristic cities. Comedy. Epic action. Hints of anime. Could they have called upon my inner child any more strongly?

Now that I'm back home after seeing the film, I can say it was everything I wanted it to be and more. The effects were absolutely incredible, the characters entertaining and believable, and the story perfectly balanced between funny, intense, and emotional. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say it's not often an entire movie theater applauds a scene less than five minutes in.

Big Hero 6 was pure joy all the way through, minus the sad scenes of course.¹ And those scenes were handled with all the care and finesse you'd expect of Disney or Pixar. Just the right amount of emotional impact to make you tear up a little. I'm not ashamed.

Brendon clearly loved it too, because he's running around the house shouting “Baymax!” and making lots of flying and vroom noises. He was also able to recite several lines out loud—and I do mean loud—during certain scenes, thanks to seeing the trailer so many times in the Disney Movies Anywhere iOS app. That made several other parents around us laugh.

The folks at Disney have nailed it yet again, though I never expected any less. My only wish is that I could somehow explore the city of San Fransokyo. It'll be a shame if they don't produce some kind of free-roaming video game where you can do exactly that.

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1. In fact, the same could be said of Feast, the Disney animated short about a puppy that showed before the movie. ↩

Disney's Impressive Rendering Technology

As Joseph Volpe of Engadget reports, the technology that went into creating Disney's upcoming movie Big Hero 6 is insane. Here, he writes about their proprietary rendering software, Hyperion:

“It’s responsible for environmental effects — stuff most audiences might take for granted, like when they see Baymax, the soft, vinyl robot featured in the film, illuminated from behind.That seemingly mundane lighting trick is no small feat; it required the use of a 55,000-core supercomputer spread across four geographic locations.”

[...]

To put the enormity of this computational effort into perspective, Hendrickson says that Hyperion “could render Tangled from scratch every 10 days.”

Even more impressive to me as a moviegoer is the invisibility of such wizardry. Most people will never notice or even think about what it took to build and illuminate the complex world of the film, and that's what makes it so magical.

John Lasseter on Storytelling

Caitlin Roper of WIRED examines the kind of philosophy that allowed John Lasseter and other members of Pixar to completely revitalize Disney's animation studio over the last decade:

“And the emotional core of a movie is what Lasseter pursues. Anybody can make films that dazzle you with technical wizardry or crack you up with biting humor. But that’s not enough for Lasseter. More than anything, the world’s most emotional executive wants to make movies that you connect with, movies that make you feel.

[...]

“The connection you make with your audience is an emotional connection,” Lasseter says. “The audience can’t be told to feel a certain way. They have to discover it themselves.”

Though I am neither an animator nor filmmaker, John Lasseter is one of my biggest heroes, right alongside Hiyao Miyazaki. These guys have set the standard for modern storytelling, and I aspire to approach writing in the same way they have film. I'm not there yet, of course—it's a work in progress.

The article also includes a line from Ed Catmull excellent book, Creativity, Inc., that aligns perfectly with what I said yesterday about words being more important than design:

“Visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.”

The Clues to a Great Story

Andrew Stanton of Pixar, during a 2012 TED Talk in which he shares some of the storytelling secrets he's learned over the years (timestamps included):

[6:22] “Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.”

[12:19] “And it just went to prove that storytelling has *guidelines*, not hard, fast rules.”

[16:27] “And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling -- to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder.”

If there's anyone I trust when it comes to guidelines for good storytelling, it's the director of Finding Nemo and WALL•E—two of my all-time favorite films. Definitely set aside twenty minutes to watch this video.