‘Big Hero 6’ links worlds of American and Japanese animation

“Big Hero 6” had me at “San Fransokyo,” the setting where cable cars get festooned with Japanese lanterns and a red bridge suggesting the Golden Gate has towers shaped like pagodas.

Disney’s latest, audacious piece of animation takes place in a Japanamerican world where the cultures inextricably intertwine, befitting a movie that mingles two great animation traditions. Before it ends in a frenzy of action that piles climax upon climax, it deals with subtler ideas than we get in the usual coming-of-age stories.

True, the five human heroes cluster between 14 and 19. They’re all brilliant nerds who, having found their own flock, shut out most of the rest of the world.

True, they have a cute, verbal, nonhuman sidekick added for comic and emotional value (and, perhaps, to sell cuddly toys at Christmas): the waddling, fluffy robot nurse Baymax, who’s designed to cure bruises but can be adapted to deliver some, too. And true, they band together to stop a deranged character who’s using microbots responsive to his thoughts to terrorize the city.

There the template ends. The movie’s not so much about courage as about forgiveness, not so much about suppressing or even destroying evil as about understanding it and trying to contain the people responsible with kindness.

Don Hall and Chris Williams direct from a script that passed through half a dozen writers (not counting the creators of the original comic book). They alternate clichés, coincidences, comedy, crises and catch-in-the-throat moments, even introducing a reasonably sophisticated plot twist midway.

The aptly named Hiro (Ryan Potter), a big-eyed kid with an anime-style shock of black hair, has finished high school at 13 and skips college in favor of illegal robot fights, which his seemingly innocuous ’bot always wins. Big brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) introduces Hiro to his college lab, where equally brilliant and mildly antisocial types flourish.

There Hiro invents tiny microbots that band together to do amazing things. He must decide whether to ally himself with a scientist devoted to helping humanity (James Cromwell) or an industrialist (Alan Tudyk) who wants to make Hiro and himself rich, but an accident derails both possibilities.

The filmmakers stock the lab with the calculation of ’40s producers choosing a regiment for a World War II flick: There’s a Latina girl (Genesis Rodriguez), an African-American guy who wants to be respected for brains rather than brawn (Damon Wayans Jr.), a feisty Asian girl (Jamie Chung), and a long-haired white dude who, like, really digs science and reads a lot of comic books (T.J. Miller).

Each has a skill, and the seemingly unbounded Hiro (who can program any computer instantly to do whatever he wants) ties them all together. They can’t succeed without him; he could probably do without any one of them but can’t stand alone, even with the adorable Baymax at his side. (The robot gently says “Uh-oh” whenever disaster looms.)

The movie could have been trimmed by shortening the final frenzy, and it introduces the usual tired, false dilemma: Someone must perish before a mission can be concluded. (We know better.) But “Big Hero 6” tells us compassion may be as important to a superhero as speed or strength, and that’s a rare message nowadays.

This story was originally published November 6, 2014 at 4:03 PM with the headline "‘Big Hero 6’ links worlds of American and Japanese animation."