Big Hero 6

Big Hero 6 manages to be so much fun that it's easy to forget that it's yet another superhero origins story. This animated adaptation of the comic book by Duncan Rouleau and Steven T. Seagle has a routine story. We learn how a team of oddball young students learns to defeat villains with high-tech weapons.

That said, Big Hero 6 also has lovable characters, a brisk pace, a fine sense of humor and a delightfully unique setting. San Fransokyo (a delightful mashup of the City by the Bay and Tokyo) is home to a thriving robotics trade. In addition to producing countless legitimate uses for cyborgs, there's also an underground robot fighting scene.

Young Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) has graduated from high school at 13 and has spent the years since creating ingenious fighting 'bots that destroy the androids others have created. Unfortunately, the owners of those robots don't take well to losing, so Hiro has to find a legal way to hone his skills.

His older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), suggests that Hiro study robotics under respected professor Robert Callaghan (James Cromwell). His students are a bright but motley bunch that includes a skateboarder named Fred (T.J. Miller), who wants to be some kind of giant lizard. The fast-fingered Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.) is another promising scholar, as are Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez) and Go Go (Jamie Chung).

Tadashi has a project in which he's especially proud. He has created a cuddly robot named Baymax (Scott Adsit) who can provide basic nursing services for those who can't afford them. Seeing how Baymax can diagnose patients without even touching them convinces Hiro that his brother's department is where he should be.

Before Hiro can start planning for his future, the school goes down in a fire and a mysterious masked fellow who has stolen Hiro's versatile nanobots (which can assume any shape or purpose imaginable) starts terrorizing the city. Hiro tries to repurpose the loving Baymax into a fighting machine with dismal results, so he recruits his new friends to design devices that can meet the new threat.

While the team Hiro assembles has some cool weapons (you'll have to see them for yourself), Big Hero 6 wisely emphasizes that destroying one's opponents isn't necessarily a worthy goal. In many ways, the amiable, seemingly innocent Baymax is wiser than his human creators because he deals with crises more calmly than his flesh-and-blood compatriots.

Just as the people are lively and genial (Maya Rudolph is a scream as Hiro and Tadashi's aunt), the setting is practically a character in itself. The hills of San Francisco and the architecture of Japan are lovingly captured and melded into a fascinating new world that, thankfully, looks a little different and captures what's beautiful in North America and Asia.

Stick around after the credits for a funny vocal cameo from an authority on superheroes. Thankfully, the rest of Big Hero 6 is just as delightful.

MovieStyle on 11/07/2014