Disney’s Big Hero 6, the winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, is about a robot nurse. Hiro Hamada, a super-genius young boy, has won an invitation to join his brother at a center for super-talented inventors by demonstrating a working prototype of a nanobot technology. However, just when high fives are on to celebrate Hiro’s successful presentation, a massive fire breaks out. Hiro’s brother, who rushes in to save his professor, is killed. All that lives on of his brother is the project he was working on: Baymax the nurse assistant robot who is activated when someone shouts: “Ouch!”.
Yet, what really hurt this year, and despite however lovable and caring Baymax is, is that the wittiest animated film of the year, The Lego Movie, wasn’t even nominated. The oddness of this can be explained by looking at two approaches to animation: the first is to use pre-existing technological methods but innovate with storytelling. The makers of South Park, for instance, deliberately slow down Maya (the industry standard animation software) since their show requires the opposite of nous. The Lego Movie looked like the Youtube videos toy brick fans make at home but with exceptional story, wit and the song, nay, credo: “EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!”
The second method, a Hollywood animated studio probably has more computing power at it’s disposal than the ballistic missile designers of India, is to push the boundaries of what is technologically possible. In other words, the Best Animated Feature category becomes less about the experience of a filmgoer and more about the digital pyrotechnics that can be invented for subsequent use by the rest of the community. By not nominating The Lego Movie, the Academy has signalled that it prefers the latter approach.
That is fair enough. Big Hero 6 has tonnes of animation tricks running through it. It’s ex-Pixar creators designed a new software for the project and their work pays off handsomely. The way the San Francisco sky looks when Hiro blasts through it on the back of his robot, the dimension inside a portal appears as if it’s been shot by the Hubble telescope and the physics that constrains Baymax’s balloon-like body when it is deflated or doing karate is all compelling.
What you don’t get is moments, like in Toy Story 3, when Barbie shouted: “Authority should be derived from the consent of the governed” arguably the most profound philosophical statement since John Locke’s treatises. Instead, we get farty sounds as Baymax holds up a finger and deflates himself. We are not even sure why the film is called Big Hero 6, it has absolutely nothing in common with the comic books it’s allegedly adapted from. Most worryingly, all bets are off about what Disney is going to do the Star Wars franchise it recently acquired from Lucas. Fist bump, pala-lalala? Nah, I’ll pass for “EVERYTHING IS AWESOME.”
(Shome is writer and blogs at www.zombiesandcomputers.blogspot.in)