Big Hero 6 is here! Disney's new animated action comedy has finally hit theaters.
The new flick, which was inspired by the Marvel comic of the same name, follows Hiro and his plus-size inflatable robot Baymax as they assemble a team of friends to form a band of high-tech heroes to battle a kabuki-masked villain.
The film features voices from T.J. Miller, Damon Wayans Jr., Maya Rudolph, Genesis Rodriguez, Ryan Potter and Scott Adsit.
So are critics loving Big Hero 6 as much as Disney's last box office blockbuster Frozen? Read on for our Big Hero 6 review roundup...
• In a review titled "How does Disney's Big Hero 6 stack up to Frozen? Not well," The New York Post's Kyle Smith critiques the movie's "slow development, bland characterizations, limp jokes and meaningless action scenes thrown in at random." "Big Hero 6 is one of those Disney movies in which you can practically see the hot breath of the marketing guy condensed on the neck of the screenwriter. The hapless scribe must have said, ‘You know what? You write this thing,'" Smith writes. "Why does the villain wear a kabuki mask? ‘It'll look cool on the action figure!' Why is there a team of superfriends if they're not going to do much of anything? ‘We need a full set of figurines for the Happy Meal.' Why are Tokyo and San Francisco merged if nothing is going to be made of this? ‘Japan is a huge sales target.'"
• NY Times writer Manohla Dargis disagrees. "Disney's latest animated feature, Big Hero 6, is a bright, visually sumptuous 3-D computer-animated feature that gives you a bit of an emotional workout," she writes, adding of "big, beautiful, bouncy," lovable Baymax, "Baymax, much like the movie itself, represents technological optimism at its shiniest and most reassuring."
• RogerEbert.com's Susan Wloszczyna had a positive response to the Big Hero 6 characters. "Much to my surprise, it didn't take long to warm to this tale set in the gleaming near-futuristic metropolis known as San Fransokyo where trolley cars and an Asian-infused Golden Gate Bridge happily co-exist with dumpling emporiums and Tokyo-inspired skyscrapers," she stated. "And how could I resist when, early on, a kick-ass gal is heard commanding a guy to ‘Stop whining! Woman up!' I also was taken from the outset by the 14-year-old hero actually named Hiro (engagingly voiced by Ryan Potter), an overly cocky punk who already has his high-school diploma. He is right on trend with other troubled misfit geniuses in films this fall including those in The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Initially, the scrawny lad invests his smarts into winning back-alley robot fights with deceptively simple electronic toys of his own design."
• "I certainly wasn't miserable during my experience watching Big Hero 6—as I laughed a good number of times at the antics and fully acknowledge and understand why every child in the world is going to want a Baymax of their own," writes Cinemablend, who gave it a mixed review. "But it's also a surprising step down from the filmmakers who brought us the magic of recent titles like Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen. These kinds of movies are built up and deconstructed so much during the production process—with writers and animators constantly forced to present their work and then have it torn down and retooled by higher-ups—that it's actually surprising something this simple would be the end result."
• The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips also praises the lovable Baymax. "In Big Hero 6 we have a robot [Baymax] considerably more beguiling than his movie. Yet there's enough visual invention afoot, and enough spirited interplay among the human characters, to keep things bobbing along," he writes.