BIG HERO 6
Roy Conli producer
So Big Hero 6 has the first Marvel characters to be adapted into a Disney animated film – could you explain how that came to be?
The idea came from director Don Hall. He was just finishing up on Winnie The Pooh back in 2010 and trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. At the time there was the merging of Marvel and Disney and as a big fan of both, Don wanted to do some Marvel short but we said, “no, you gotta do a movie.” So, we got Marvel involved and Don looked through the whole canon and came across Big Hero 6: a very little known title with six issues in the ’ 80s and six in the ’ 90s. He was taken with this superhero team from Tokyo, and the unique story we could tell. But Big Hero 6 is set in San Fransokyo, a hybrid of San Franscisco and Tokyo?
It’s a city of the near- future, a parallel universe, maybe... There was certainly a conscious choice to set it outside the Marvel universe, to give it its own identity. In terms of tone, how hard was it to strike that balance between it being a Marvel and Disney kids’ film?
It was always going to be more of a Disney animated film and so it was really about finding a property that both we and Marvel felt comfortable could become ours. There had always been discussions like, “Oh, this is more Marvel than that,” but it all comes down to just great storytelling. How can you tell the story that’s actually going to affect people? We deal with some mature themes in this film, and that’s why I think Disney storytelling is really great.
RELEASED
30 January
DIRECTORS
Don Hall and Chris Williams
STARS Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, Jamie Chung, Damon Wayans Jr, Génesis Rodríguez,
TJ Miller, Maya Rudolph
THE PITCH Boy- genius Hiro Hamada and his
inflatable robot Baymax turn superhero in the first Marvel comic – and a niche one, at that – to be given the kiddie treatment
by Disney.