Walt Disney Studios previewed their upcoming animated superhero movie Big Hero 6 with some footage at their Animation Studios in Burbank, CA and CraveOnline got interviews with the filmmakers. Based on the little known Marvel comic, the movie centers on Hiro, a young inventor who’s lost his brother, and Baymax, a health care robot who inflates before his eyes in his late brother’s room.
Some of the footage we saw included incredible action and movement around the fictional city of San Fransokyo, which combined Asian style arches with the hills of our tech savvy city. Baymax was also a source of good comedy, asking about human euphemisms, and taping up his tears with scotch tape.
Directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, Big Hero 6 also features Robert Baird as a screenwriter on the film and Paul Briggs as Head of Story. We sat down with Baird and Briggs to discuss the adaptation of Big Hero 6. Big Hero 6 opens November 7 and we’ll have a lot more coverage about it at CraveOnline.
Related: Villain Revealed in New ‘Big Hero 6’ Trailer
CraveOnline: Were you involved in choosing the characters from the Big Hero 6 comics that would appear in the movie?
Paul Briggs: We weren’t involved, no. The characters had been defined and brought into the film when we came into it.
Does Baymax have the same powers in the movie that he has in the comic books?
Paul Briggs: No, I don’t believe he does. I don’t think the health care robot is part of the Big Hero 6 comic. I think what we’re doing is we’re taking a completely fresh take on it that’s unlike the comic book. When Don brought the project, he definitely was inspired by the comic and the Hiro/Baymax relationship, but everything else is definitely a fresh new take on it.
So is San Fransokyo also new?
Robert Baird: San Fransokyo is also new, yeah.
Did you try any other mashups of cities before you found San Fransokyo?
Paul Briggs: It is kind of a running joke of what else exists? There’s San Fransokyo, so what other weird cities exist in this world?
Robert Baird: But not that I know of. I think San Fransokyo was the one. I think at one point it was called San Frantokyo and then became San Fransokyo.
As screenwriter and story department, do you do anything to indicate what the architecture will be, or is that all the animation department?
Paul Briggs: Definitely when we begin. We present the whole world idea to Lasseter so you get immersed right away in this is the world that this story is going to take place in. So that’s very, very early on, like this is the mashed up world that this story’s going to reside in.
Robert Baird: But there’s a visual development department here who’s designing the city or trying to figure out what the city will look like. That’s sort of happening independently of the story being created.
Do you also work with the comedy rule of threes when Baymax pulls three strips of scotch tape?
Robert Baird: Yes, rule of threes, absolutely. Comedy is all about the rule of threes. I don’t know why that is, but it always seems to work out that way.
Paul Briggs: That’s kind of the fun thing about the environment we’re in upstairs where we’re pitching to all these people in the room. You get a really quick sense of what is working comedically and what isn’t. That’s your first test audience.
Are you also dealing with a robot who doesn’t understand metaphors or human word usage like “hurt” or “sick?” Do you get a lot of mileage out of that?
Robert Baird: It took a while to find Baymax’s voice and to decide is this a robot who will stay completely robotic throughout the whole movie, or will he evolve and take on and become a learning robot? Will that be part of his health care matrix to understand humans better and understand the way they speak and relate to each other? At first, he wasn’t necessarily like that but he evolved into that kind of character. Once he did, we realized yeah, you can get some mileage out of him. Let’s have him hear these turns of phrases and process that and try to understand these colloquialisms and so on. It’s so charming to see him try to do that. It makes him so endearing.
Are there other “robots meet modern day humans” clichés you wanted to avoid?
Robert Baird: I don’t know if that was ever top of mind.
Paul Briggs: No, I don’t think that ever really entered. We did want to treat him always true. Chris was always great about that, at just always treating him true of I have a function. That is, I am a health care robot. We didn’t want him to come out of the gate and learn stuff right away and adapt and evolve. Just keeping it simple with him.
The visual effects department told us there are seven action sequences in the film. Do you write each of them out beat for beat?
Robert Baird: You know, it’s the fantastic thing about the collaboration here and working with storyboard artists. When we’re writing the script and we know that there’s an action sequence, we know what we want the action sequence to accomplish, that at the beginning, we want this to be here. At the end, we want this to happen. What happens in the middle, it’s like, “Over to you, story team.” And it’s their genius. They are visual thinkers in such a great way.
Paul Briggs: You’ve got to craft it though in a way too, because you’re building to a big climax in a film so you want your action sequences to build even in a way so that your final action sequence is bigger than anything before. It’s a challenge. It’s a big challenge to make unique ways to keep it energetic and fresh.
Robert Baird: If that’s true that there are seven action sequences, and you’re probably right, then one of the big challenges of the movie is the balance between comedy and heart and action. It’s a superhero movie so people are going to come in with the expectation, we want some great action. And we hope that it’s in there. I think it is in there, but we found out as we were making the movie, there’s such a thing as having too much action. It can really become fatiguing after a while. It’s like, “Oh no, not another action sequence.” So we really had to find the right balance of all those elements.
How far did certain action sequences get before you had to pull them back?
Paul Briggs: I remember our final action sequence even, we have this big set piece that I remember watching it and we probably chopped it down to half. It was just way too massive and you could feel it. That’s the great thing too. Pitching it and seeing the screenings, you can suffer from this repetitive action that happens but then it goes to that fatigue, where it’s not only action, action, action but within action there’s repeating and crunching.
Is that as early as storyboard stage?
Paul Briggs: It happens in all things. It happens while we’re pitching it in the room. It happens once we’re in editorial. It happens once we’re in screenings. Definitely along the way you’re getting different takes from it.
Is part of Hiro’s journey going to be that even if he gets justice from the one responsible for his death, that doesn’t necessarily bring him peace?
Robert Baird: Yeah, Hiro has this tragedy happen in his life and really the story is about how does he deal with this? There are different paths that he can go down and it’s really that relationship with Baymax. Baymax, who is just this simple health care robot, sort of helps him get onto a path. We’ll see in the movie how it all turns out.
Where do the other characters fit in?
Paul Briggs: Well, it’s definitely that. That’s a big reason I love this film. It’s the family around you. In our movie, like San Fransokyo, it’s a mashup of the family unit. It’s not just the immediate family. You’ve got an aunt and you’ve got these friends and this support group. These are the people that become your family and how they play into that as well. The same thing that Baymax is helping Hiro with, that team influences as well.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
