Like so many movies from Walt Disney Studios, the hero in Big Hero 6, Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), lost his parents at a young age and is searching for a place to belong in the world. When his older brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) finally gets him on the right track by taking him to the super-duper science lab where Tadashi has created a cutting-edge robot named Baymax (Scott Adsit), whose job it is to take care of people, tragedy strikes.
Hiro turns to Baymax in his time of need, as well as a group of science-minded friends — adrenaline junkie Go Go Tomago (Jamie Chung), neatnik Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.), chemistry whiz Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez) and fanboy Fred (T.J. Miller) – to use their smarts to help him solve the mystery of what really happened that tragic night in San Fransokyo, and who was behind it.
At the press day for Big Hero 6, co-directors Don Hall and Chris Williams discuss the evolution of the Marvel comic book to an animated film, building the city of San Fransokyo, why the decision was made not to have the heroes have superpowers, and more.
How exciting was it when you discovered the Big Hero 6 comics in the Marvel vaults? This is a franchise that nobody has really heard about.
Don Hall: When you’re first developing a story, or even in development with John [Lasseter], you don’t pick one idea, you pick at least three so that you don’t put all your emotional eggs in one basket. That’s John’s process and that’s worked for many years now. After that first conversation when I said, “I want to do a Marvel thing,” and he’s, like, “I love that you wanna do a Marvel thing. Go find something.” Literally it was that simple. I just started making lists of things that I thought would be cool. Some of the properties I knew from my childhood and beyond and some of them I didn’t. Big Hero 6 was one of the ones I didn’t.
I would scroll on my lunch hours through the Marvel Wiki page that has all of their 5,000+ characters. And the first thing I saw was Big Hero 6. I thought, “Ooh, that’s interesting. What is that?” Japanese superhero team. So I bought the comics, read them and I was impressed with the tone of it. It was light-hearted, fun and the characters are very appealing. The whole thing was this love letter to Japanese pop culture. We all saw an emotional potential there, an emotional story between this kid who suffers a loss and this robot who tries to heal him.
It had some, I guess what I call, humble beginnings, but I’m absolutely thrilled that it’s become what it is today.
What’s really interesting here is you guys have really upped the ante. You’ve got 
more than 700 characters in this film. How challenging was that when you, in addition to your main 15 to 20 that you have, and then you bring in all these others?
Chris Williams: We did a lot of things you’re not supposed to do in animation. We have a large cast. We have a fairly dense plot, a mystery plot. We have two genres, the boy and his dog, i.e. the boy and his robot, and then the superhero origin. Normally, you want fewer characters, a simpler plot line and that was a big challenge. So much of the journey of making this movie is about taking all of these disparate elements and making them work together.
Don: Early on, there was a lot of forward thinking by Kyle Odermatt, who’s our visual effects supervisor, as well as the animation team, who knew that while we’re working on the story, they needed to set us up for success as far as the world.
And part of that was we were gonna build the city of San Franscokyo so that we can fly around and go wherever we want. And we populated that city with a bunch of people, and we didn’t want them to look like the same person, because we hate that. So there was a lot of forward thinking early on while the story was coming together of those type of things. And that really set us up for success later.
Talk about the crowd system called Denizen, which revolutionizes how artists create and animate crowds, and gave you the opportunity to do that kind of stuff.
Don: Because they had to, all the animators got on early, so they started doing tests with the main characters which is what you do. But while those characters were getting modeled and fine-tuned and rigged, we also started doing cycles for these crowd characters. So they did cycles of characters walking up the street, cycles of people looking at their phone.
There was a whole library of things that were just behaviors that people do in cities. And we were able to then populate the city with that type of thing. And then put our resources into special animation and animate special things. Like if a character had to look at Baymax across the street, that would be a unique piece of animation. But all of that preparation really paid off when we really hit the production crunch.
Chris: Our crew was so invested in the movie, they really wanted to do everything they could to make the world feel plausible and believable and realized. And so as I look around the city, even now I’m noticing things. There will be characters doing sign language way off in the corner and there’s all this very specific animation that isn’t just cycled. It wasn’t good enough for them. It had to feel more believable than that and more specific than that.
You’ve made a lot of changes along the way. What was it that you kept that was in the comic book?
Don: The title? I’m not even kidding. The title and the characters’ names.
Chris: And the powers they have now. The technology is loosely based, very loosely based, on their original characters.
Don: Loosely, loosely, loosely. Go Go Tomago, she’s the speedster in the comic book, but it took on a completely different form. It was a jet-powered suit that she rolled around in.
And Honey Lemon had a purse that opened up to another dimension in the comic books. We tried to just make it more grounded in real science. That may seem strange because in animation you can do anything. But it’s really important for us to ground it in a believable world. And it’s actually really important to John, too. And, therefore, those early decisions, early on to kind of put a stake in the ground and say, “Nobody’s super powered. Nobody’s going to turn into anything.” There’s no gamma radiated — not that I don’t like that. I love that stuff. But for this movie it was going to be no super powers and it was going to be super tech. Then we extrapolated from there. So yeah, their powers are loosely based on some of the kind of broad stroke ideas that they had in the comic book but we pretty much reinvented that.
We did keep the tone of the love letter to Japanese pop culture. We definitely kept that spirit.
I’m reminded a bit of Meet the Robinsons with this whole theme that science is cool. and that being a nerd is cool. Was this a deliberate theme?
Don: It was deliberate, the idea that being a nerd is cool is deliberate for the movie, because these are all science kids and self-described nerds. Wasabi says it, “We’re nerds!” in the movie. But there wasn’t any deliberate references to Meet the Robinsons or anything we’ve done prior. It was really more specific to the story that we were creating.
Chris: And, certainly a lot of people who work in animation spent a lot of their childhood in their bedroom, drawing and writing and we’re a variation on nerd, that’s for sure.
Big Hero 6 zooms into theaters on Friday, Nov. 7.
The post Directors Don Hall and Chris Williams on Taking Big Hero 6 From Comics to the Movies also appeared on PCM Reviews.