Production
After the Walt Disney Company's acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009, CEO Bob Iger encouraged the company's divisions to explore Marvel's properties for adaptation concepts.[24] By deliberately picking an obscure title, it would give them the freedom to come up with their own version.[25] While directing Winnie the Pooh (2011), director Don Hall was scrolling through a Marvel database when he stumbled upon Big Hero 6, a comic he had never heard of before. "I just liked the title," he said. He pitched the concept to John Lasseter in 2011, as one of five ideas[26] for possible productions for Walt Disney Animation Studios, and this particular idea "struck a chord" with Lasseter, Hall and Chris Williams.[27][28][29]
In June 2012, Disney confirmed that Walt Disney Animation Studios was adapting Marvel Comics' series and that the film had been commissioned into early stages of development.[30][31] Because they wanted the concept to feel new and fresh, head of story Paul Briggs (who also voices Yama in the film[32]) only read a few issues of the comic, while screenwriter Robert L. Baird admitted he had not read the comic at all.[33]
Big Hero 6 was produced solely by Walt Disney Animation Studios,[34] although several members of Marvel's creative team were involved in the film's production including Joe Quesada, Marvel's chief creative officer, and Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel Television.[35][36] According to an interview with Axel Alonso by Comic Book Resources,[37] Marvel did not have any plans to publish a tie-in comic.[38] Disney planned to reprint the Marvel version of Big Hero 6 themselves, but reportedly Marvel disagreed. They eventually came to agreement that Yen Press would publish the Japanese manga version of Big Hero 6 for Disney.[39]
Conversely, Lasseter dismissed the idea of a rift between the two companies, and producer Roy Conli stated that Marvel allowed Disney "complete freedom in structuring the story".[40][41] Disney Animation Studio President Andrew Millstein stated: "Hero is one example of what we've learned over the years and our embracing some of the Pixar DNA."[42] Regarding the film's story, Quesada stated, "The relationship between Hiro and his robot has a very Disney flavor to it ... but it's combined with these Marvel heroic arcs."[27] The production team decided early on not to connect the film to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and instead set the film in a stand-alone universe.[43]
With respect to the design of Baymax, Hall mentioned in an interview, "I wanted a robot that we had never seen before and something to be wholly original. That's a tough thing to do, we've got a lot of robots in pop culture, everything from The Terminator to WALL-E to C-3PO on down the line and not to mention Japanese robots, I won't go into that. So I wanted to do something original." Even if they did not yet know what the robot should look like, artist Lisa Keene came up with the idea that it should be a huggable robot.[44] Other sources of inspiration cited by the team include Japanese anime, such as Hayao Miyazaki films, including Spirited Away (2001) and The Wind Rises (2013), and Pokémon, as well as Shogun Warriors toys.[45] Mecha designer Shigeto Koyama, who previously did design work for mecha anime such as Gunbuster 2, Eureka Seven, Gurren Lagann, and Rebuild of Evangelion, worked on the concept design for Baymax.
Early on in the development process, Hall and the design team took a research trip to Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, where they met a team of DARPA-funded[48] researchers who were pioneering the new field of 'soft robotics' using inflatable vinyl,[49][50] which ultimately inspired Baymax's inflatable, vinyl, truly huggable design.[41][51][52] Hall stated that "I met a researcher (Chris Atkeson[53]) who was working on soft robots. ... It was an inflatable vinyl arm and the practical app would be in the healthcare industry as a nurse or doctor's assistant. He had me at vinyl. This particular researcher went into this long pitch but the minute he showed me that inflatable arm, I knew we had our huggable robot."
Hall mentioned that achieving a unique look for the mechanical armor took some time and "just trying to get something that felt like the personality of the character" Williams stated, "A big part of the design challenge is when he puts on the armor you want to feel that he's a very powerful intimidating presence ... at the same time, design-wise he has to relate to the really adorable simple vinyl robot underneath."[55] Baymax's face design was inspired by a copper suzu bell that Hall noticed while at a Shinto shrine.[56]
According to Conli, Lasseter initially disliked Baymax's description (while low on battery power) of Hiro's cat as a "hairy baby", but Williams kept the line in anyway, and at the film's first test screening, Lasseter admitted that Williams was correct.[57]
According to Williams, Baymax was originally going to be introduced rather late in the film, but then story artist John Ripa conceived of a way for Baymax to meet Hiro much earlier.[58] The entire film became much stronger by establishing the relationship between Hiro and Baymax early on, but the filmmakers ended up having to reconstruct "a fair amount of the first act" in order to make that idea work.[58]
About ninety animators worked on the film at one point or another; some worked on the project for as long as two years.[59] In terms of the film's animation style and settings, the film combines Eastern world culture (predominantly Japanese) with Western world culture (predominantly California).[60] In May 2013, Disney released concept art and rendered footage of San Fransokyo from the film.[61] San Fransokyo, the futuristic mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo, was described by Hall as "an alternate version of San Francisco. Most of the technology is advanced, but much of it feels retro … Where Hiro lives, it feels like the Haight. I love the Painted ladies. We gave them a Japanese makeover; we put a cafe on the bottom of one. They live above a coffee shop." The house that Hiro's family lives in is based on a Victorian house at the corner of Haight Street and Masonic Avenue in the Haight-Ashbury.[62] According to production designer Paul Felix, "The topography is exaggerated because what we do is caricature, I think the hills are 1 1/2 times exaggerated. I don't think you could really walk up them ... When you get to the downtown area, that's when you get the most Tokyo-fied, that pure, layered, dense kind of feeling of the commercial district there. When you get out of there, it becomes more San Francisco with the Japanese aesthetic. … (It's a bit like) Blade Runner (1982), but contained to a few square blocks. You see the skyscrapers contrasted with the hills."
The reason why Disney wanted to merge Tokyo (which is where the comic book version takes place) with San Francisco was partly because San Francisco had not been used by Marvel before, partly because of all the city's iconic aspects, and partly because they felt its aesthetics would blend well with Tokyo.[33] The filmmakers' idea was that San Fransokyo is based on an alternative history in which San Francisco was largely rebuilt by Japanese immigrants in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, although this premise is not stated in the film.[64]
To create San Fransokyo as a detailed digital simulation of an entire city, Disney purchased the actual assessor data for the entire city and county of San Francisco.[59] The final city contains over 83,000 buildings and 100,000 vehicles.[59]
A software program called Denizen was used to create over 700 distinctive characters[59] that populate the city.[65] Another one named Bonzai was responsible for the creation of the city's 250,000 trees,[66] while a new rendering system called Hyperion offered new illumination possibilities, like light shining through a translucent object (e.g. Baymax's vinyl covering).[67] Pixar's RenderMan was considered as a "Plan B" for the film's rendering, if Hyperion was not able to meet production deadlines.[5]
Development on Hyperion started in 2011 and was based upon research into multi-bounce complex global illumination originally conducted at Disney Research in Zürich.[59] Disney, in turn, had to assemble a new super-computing cluster just to handle Hyperion's immense processing demands, which consists of over 2,300 Linux workstations distributed across four data centers (three in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco).[59] Each workstation, as of 2014, included a pair of 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processors, 256 GB of memory, and a pair of 300 GB solid-state drives configured as a RAID Level 0 array (i.e., to operate as a single 600 GB drive).[59] This was all backed by a central storage system with a capacity of five petabytes, which holds all digital assets as well as archival copies of all 54 Disney Animation films.[59] Cinematographer Robert Richardson was brought on as a visual consultant to assist in the creation of realistic lighting.
The emotional climax takes place in the middle of a wormhole portal, which is represented by the stylized interior of a mandelbulb.[68]
The post-credits scene was only added to the film in August 2014, late in production, after Hall and his crew went to see Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). He stated that "[i]t horrified us, that people were sat waiting for an end credits thing, because of the Marvel DNA. We didn't want people to leave the movie disappointed."[69]
