Disney has long been at the forefront of technological advances in the animation film, and the studio’s latest project, Big Hero 6, is certainly no exception. Directors Don Hall and Chris Williams had a very distinct vision for how the film should look, and their ideas led to the creator of Hyperion, a software created by the Disney team to revolutionize and streamline the way light bounces are calculated – a process so complex that it took a 55,000-core supercomputer to get the job done.
With Big Hero 6 opening in theaters today, Hall and Williams are finally able to enjoy the fruits of their labors, and allow audiences to experience the culmination of the past three and a half years of work. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak to the directors via telephone about Big Hero 6, and its journey from the comic book page to the big screen in Disney’s first animated Marvel film.
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First off, let me start by saying that I loved the film. This movie is awesome.
Don Hall: Thank you, man. We’re really proud of it. And we’re really excited we’re in that place now where people can finally see it. We’ve been able to show it to our families a little bit, so they can kind of see what we’ve been doing for three and a half years. [laughs]
Chris Williams: Yeah, it’s been really gratifying. We’ve been able to sit and watch it with audiences a few times now. You work for years on these things, and this one was an especially ambitious story, and we had this amazing crew of artists. Everybody gives everything they have, and you spend late nights, long weeks, and it can be trying at times. But when it’s all finished and you can be proud of it, and you sit there with an audience and you hear them laughing or hear them getting engaged with the more emotional sections, it makes it all worthwhile.
I kind of got a little bit of an E.T. vibe from this film. The core story is about a kid whose best friend it this sort of other-worldly being – obviously, E.T. was an alien and Baymax is a robot – but it still had that 80’s Amblin movie feeling. Was that an intentional homage?
Hall: Well, I guess it was sort of intentional, in that it feels like E.T. fits into this genre of the “boy and his dog” story. That was the core of the movie – no matter what, we knew the emotional story of this movie was going to be about this 14-year-old genius who loses his older brother, and his older brother’s robot is going to become that surrogate big brother. So everything had to fit on that spine: all the superhero origin stuff and everything else really had to fit in the context of that. So it was definitely intentional, in that we were focusing on the “kid and the robot” story.
Williams: Yeah, we knew that was the center of the film, and we knew the dynamic and the relationship between Hiro and Baymax, everything would live or die on that relationship. We knew that it was a superhero story, but it had to really serve the story of Hiro and Baymax.
Going back to the development, and even the conceptual process, did you know from the very beginning that you wanted to make an animated Marvel film?
Hall: I definitely wanted to make a Marvel/Disney hybrid. I pitched the idea to John [Lasseter] as I was finishing up Winnie the Pooh, the potential of mashing up these two entities, and he loves it and said “go find us something.” I spent quite awhile looking for stuff and made list of things, and came across Big Hero 6, which was new to me. I had never read it, I just liked the title, I thought it sounded cool. Then I researched it and saw that it was a Japanese superhero team, and I thought that sounded cool, then I actually got the comics and read them.
I felt like it was an interesting take on a superhero team, in that all the characters were fun and appealing and everything was kind of light-hearted. And you could tell that the creators, Duncan Rouleau and Steven Seagle, just really loved Japanese pop culture and tried to weave that into this superhero story. So that was all there, and then from that we could extract theat there could also be this really emotional story.
Williams: About three and a half years ago, Don pitched a very skeletal outline of the story, and you could see right away this held potential. And you could see that he was going to be taking things on that would defy people’s expectations for a superhero story. So we were all really excited, and it was something we were all thrilled about, and we were very happy when John Lasseter greenlit it.
When you first started working on this film, the technology necessary to make the film you wanted to make didn’t even exist at the time. The Disney team basically had to create that technology with Hyperion. Was there a backup plan, in case you weren’t able to make this work the way you had envisioned?
Hall: No. [laughs]
Williams: No. [laughs]We didn’t have that backup parachute.
Hall: We don’t believe in backup plans, man. You’ve gotta go forward, you can’t go backward! They had just created Hyperion when we started this, and it really hadn’t been tested out, so there was a little hand-wringing in the beginning, because we knew we were going to be biting off a lot as far as the look of this film, and we really wanted to push ourselves. We just had a lot of faith in the team involved that no matter what, if there’s a problem we’ll figure out a way to fix it.
Williams: Yeah, there’s definitely a culture here at Disney Animation that’s been instilled, on the artistic side but also on the technology side, that people aren’t afraid of a challenge. They never want to back away from a challenge or from an opportunity to make the movie better. The guys on the tech side saw how ambitious our story was, and they knew they needed to do things differently in order to serve that story. And rather than shying away from that or being intimidated by it, they just took it on, and I think they’re really proud of their contribution to this film, as well.
Alright, let’s get to some of the fun stuff, with all the Marvel Easter eggs hidden in the film. Is that a portrait of Stan Lee that I saw?
Hall: Well, it certainly resembles him. [laughs]
Williams: We think it looks a lot like him. [laughs]It’s uncanny.
With stuff like that, and even the more obscure references, how did you decide what went into the film? Was anything specifically requested by Marvel?
Hall: It never came from Marvel. For any of the Easter eggs in the film, we always asked them. Fred’s room in particular has the bulk of the Marvel Easter eggs, which is very appropriate. But no, it was never mandated by Marvel, it actually came from us.
Williams: It ends up being fairly organic. Most of the things that are in there were not placed by Don or I, they would just come from the artists. Here in-house, we have a lot of people who are fans of Marvel, but also fans of Disney’s history, and they’re always trying to place things. It got to the point where Don and I actually had to tell them to knock it off, and we actually had to take a couple of things out. But I think it will be fun for the fans to look for those things.
Hall: Yeah, there’s more than a couple.
The film definitely fits into the mold of a superhero origin story, and it ends in a way that the audience feels there could be more adventures for this team. Have there already been talks about doing another film with these characters?
Hall: Well, there’s been requests. [laughs] I think people that have seen the movie would love to see some further adventures, but we haven’t really talked about it. We just haven’t had the chance. We put every ounce of everything into this, just to get it to be the best that we could, and right now we just want to focus on taking a break, getting a vacation, and then thinking about what happens next. But we do love these characters so much, so we’ll see what happens.
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Big Hero 6 is now playing in theaters everywhere.
big hero 6 chris williams disney don hall featured