Creating the colourful world of Disney/Marvel hybrid Big Hero 6.
Disney’s first animated film based on a Marvel comic, Big Hero 6 sees a band of friends turn themselves into high-flying superheroes using robotics. Co-directors Don Hall and Chris Williams talk Total Film through their production art and research photogr
Director Don Hall, Chris Williams Starring Scott Adsit, Ryan Potter, T.J. Miller, Jamie Chung, Damon Wayans ETA 30 January
Don Hall: “It began with a five-minute conversation that John Lasseter and I had as I was walking him out to his car at the end of the day. I hadn’t put together a pitch for him yet, but he had heard I was interested in doing something with Marvel. He thought that sounded awesome. I’m a big Marvel Comics fan. So I just started putting ideas together. Then we started meeting with the Marvel guys, and it all happened organically. It sounds weird, but that’s what happened.”
Chris Williams: “Don expressed an interest in Big Hero 6, and I think they were a bit surprised because it was one of the more obscure titles. But they were great. They said, “Absolutely,” and they understood that it was going to be a springboard and that the characters were going to evolve quite a bit. They were supportive and encouraging to Don in finding the vision of the movie.”
DH: “It’s the story of a 14-year-old super genius named Hiro (voiced by Ryan Potter) who loses his best friend and older brother. And his older brother’s robot, Baymax (Scott Adsit), becomes his surrogate big brother and attempts to heal him. That’s the emotional story. The secondary story is the superhero origin story, but to us it was always secondary. The emotional story was really what this movie was about. Thematically. it’s about loss, and specifically it’s about how when people die they don’t really go away – they live on through the people that are left behind. That felt like a universal theme.”
CW: “On the surface, it appears to be a superhero movie. And it is – we wanted to honour that – but at the same time we wanted to defy the expectations of what a superhero movie can be.”