Hacker Cinema
Big Hero 6
2014 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Don Hall, Chris Williams
AdventureFamilyAnimationActionComedy
A special bond develops between plus-sized inflatable robot Baymax, and prodigy Hiro Hamada, who team up with a group of friends to form a band of high-tech heroes.
9 positive1 negative15 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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25 comments on Hacker News
What work of Disney is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identit" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
Yeah, I often cite Big Hero 6 (from 2014) as the place where as an animation fan I felt Hyperion (Disney's renderer) very visibly in the end product out-paced Renderman (Pixar's more mature renderer). Big Hero 6's wide shots get truly wide and the scale of its San Fransokyo is almost palpable in many sequences, showing off especially Hyperion's focus on being able to do dynamic crowd work and large crowd scenes and plenty of architecture surrounding that. (Zootopia in 2016 further cemented that Hyperion was great at crowd work.) It was one of my complaints with Pixar's Soul in 2020 that its New Orleans felt almost claustrophobic and isolated, no truly wide establishing shots, no real crowds to speak of, mostly just shots of one or two characters in close up on city streets that in the real world New Orleans would be bustling and busy. Real New Orleans has a different kind of claustrophia from big crowds and never feels isolating or as lonely. Some of that may have been the intended vibe for that particular movie, but some of that seems technical at this point from the different focuses Hyperion and Renderman have been given and how much I think Hyperion shows technical improvement and mastery of somethings that Renderman cannot seem to do.
It somewhat suggests that Disney is correct in having the two studios compete in renderers rather than share one (even as they unify other parts of the process, such as this article mentions moving to Pixar's Presto tool as one of the things that happened in Zootopia 2's production).
The franchise really went down in quality with the last movie, Big Hero 6.
Staggered how? They have averaged a movie a year for the last 40 years. The Disney live action movies have almost nothing to do with the release schedule of Disney Animation movies, nor have they impacted how many get made. They are completely different studios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output.
Disney Animation Studios rarely get a mention next to Pixar, but their 3D films are equally as good. Bolt, Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph, Big Hero 6, Zootopia...
I understand this point. Many doctors I see always being very social, and smiling in public even though they have seen horrors in the ER room, etc. I kind of get a bit of the callous, emotionally stable, and always cheery, positive nature but isn't too emotionally deep (think of the doctor in movies, where they give the bad news with a straight face) they need to have to be able to operate like a robot, ironically enough.
But, maybe instead of what this article proposes, we do the opposite, we make our doctors more empathetic, and leave the robot to do the grunt work, machinery, surgery, etc. A lot of comments are saying they find the empathy useful. I'm not sure if I will be able to tell if someone sends me a crafted message, but I don't like the idea of a message being sent by ChatGPT that is meant to artificially create empathy, to me it's fake empathy.
This is all theory, but I don't think robots creating fake empathy would resonate with humans once this is widespread. Maybe it creates a sort of disconnection, where people just blatantly avoid falling for text messages and paragraphs that sound empathetic.
There are some similarities too with the movie Big-Hero 6, and the Bayman robot that was created as a care robot. Initially, Hiro is very annoyed by it, because of it's rote "artificial empathy" voice and messages. But it's intelligence is what brings him around, when it understands things like contexts better.
Yup. Even if you only look within a relatively small category of films one per year can miss a bunch. For example, consider the category of animated feature length films released after 2000 in the US, and pick one per year by picking the winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
In 2001 you'd miss Monsters, Inc. because of Shrek.
In 2002 you'd miss Lilo & Stitch because of Spirited Away.
In 2004 you'd miss Shrek 2 because of The Incredibles.
In 2005 you'd miss Howl's Moving Castle and Corpse Bride because of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
In 2008, no Kung Fu Panda because of WALL-E.
In 2009, no Coraline or Fantastic Mr. Fox because of Up.
In 2010 you'd miss How to Train Your Dragon because of Toy Story 3.
In 2011 no Kung Fu Panda 2 because of Rango.
In 2012 no Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, or Wreck-it Ralph because of Brave.
In 2014 no How to Train Your Dragon 2 because of Big Hero 6.
2015 no Shaun the Sheep Movie because of Inside Out.
2016 you miss Kubo and the Two Strings and Moana because of Zootopia.
2019 No How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World because of Toy Story 4.
2021 you'd miss Raya and the Last Dragon and Luca because of Encanto.
Most of the winners are good...but if you just put all the above mentioned films in a pool and asked most people to pick their top 14, most would have a lot of films on their list that were not among the winners of the aforementioned years.
i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist.
frozen moana frozen 2 encanto
during that time there were also traditional "villain" types: big hero 6 zootopia ralph breaks the internet raya and the last drago
agree or disagree, it's an interesting read: https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-copy-good/
I had completely forgotten about Big Hero 6, some kids' movies really are great.
Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:
Tomorrowland
Big Hero 6
Robots (2005)
The Martian
Sneakers
Real Genius
Wargames
Macguyver (80s show)
Cosmos
October Sky
Iron Man
The Astronaut Farmer
Flight of the Phoenix
Something Ventured
Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)
10 years is a lot of time, and "worth saving" is a very low barrier.
I'd classify Kubo And The Two Strings, and Inside Out as must-watch films. Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse set new boundaries for what's possible with animation.
Moana, Zootopia, Big Hero 6, Wreck-it Ralph, The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory are all pretty good films, and definitely tick all the boxes you listed.
I'm not even looking at Anomalisa, Isle of Dogs, and other such more adult-oriented animated films.
I don't think it's the same thing for Disney to create fantastic to CG animation, and Disney to buy Pixar.
They are doing both (creating and buying). They bought Pixar, but are also making movies internally that are comparable in quality like Frozen, Big Hero 6, Moana, and Wreck it Ralph.
This is completely nonsensical.
Toy Story? Cars? Inside Out? Up? Coco?
None of these follow that template. Sure, some like a Bugs Life and Rattatouille follow this, but in quirky ways. All conventional narrative structure involves an external incident. That sets up the central conflict of the narrative.
Disney movies like Big Hero 6, Moana or Frozen are more likely to follow it, though again, there’s a lot more craft in the story and surrounding context than the base structure suggests.
> A lot of cyberpunk and space opera is like that, I think, particularly in art.
This is a really interesting observation, thank you.
If we use Neuromancer a rough start date for cyberpunk, there was nothing 'alternate' about the whole "future of neon and kanji" style. And Snow Crash made an effort to change with the times; the Japanese stylings get justified as a character thing instead of a cultural one and the psychedelic hacking gets replaced with a decent anticipation of Second Life. The Diamond Age sticks with the Japanese emphasis, but brings in China and India as major powers, and updates the sci-fi focus to nanotech.
But somewhere along the line the strength of the aesthetic sort of overwhelms the attempt at futurism. Gibson came back to the near future and present, Stephenson went to the past, present, and then the far future. The last really future-facing cyberpunk novel I can remember reading was Infoquake, and reviewers kept saying that was "practically cyberpunk" or "had elements of cyberpunk".
And then at the other end of things, Altered Carbon has humans as an interstellar species, but still gives us a half-white, half-Japanese protagonist getting pushed around San Francisco by rich people. Shadowrun goes all the way to magic spells and centaurs, but the videogames retain the rainy East Asian atmosphere. And Big Hero 6 proves it's an aesthetic you can export completely; it might be a PG superhero movie, but it's about a half-Japanese kid named Hiro having illegal robot fights in a neon-drenched "San Fransokyo".
I don't know enough to do the whole rundown, but I suspect you're right about space opera too: Star Trek and 2001 start off as a modern/futuristic vision, but endure as this weird near-googie style we recognize as its own entity.
I suppose some aesthetics are way more fun to look at than to actually live in - we keep them around for art's sake long after they fail to take root.
The state transition table is encoded in logic for FPGA and as global memory table for GPU. Why didn't they try to encode state transitions as code on GPU?
Also, did they try to use enhanced locality introduced by processing several streams on GPU? E.g., if you keep states sorted as for tuple (state id, stream id) for all your streams, you may get more memory-controller friendly access pattern. I haven't seen mentions of that technique (which MUST be considered after Big Hero 6 [1] - they used that technique to never miss caches in whole movie rendering process). Big Hero 6 is 2014, the paper is 2017.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hero_6_(film)
I really do not like papers like one linked by you. One system gets all of the treatment while other ones get... whatever is left.
I guess have they tried to use these techniques for GPUs, they would get performance gap that is much less than reported.
There's one for Big Hero 6 too. Don't care much for the animation style; if they're gonna go 2D I'd rather they used something that looked smooth and dynamic, like Kim Possible. But plot-wise it keeps up much of the vibe of the film.
> I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
False. Here's some of their animated features based on copyrighted works (as best as I can tell):
Dumbo
Bambi
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Treasure Planet (partially based on the 1987 TV miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space)
Meet the Robinsons
The Princess and the Frog
Big Hero 6
(I'm using the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films, and picking out the “based on” or ”inspired by” credits that look recent enough.)
Also coming into play during Moana is the hyperion rendering engine, which was first showcased in Big Hero 6:
https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperion
Also, here's an article containing some stills from the movie:
http://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2016/11/moana.html
Not only that but programmers and STEM professions are starting to be highlighted in pop culture in very positive ways such as Big Hero 6.
Contrast that with movies from the 80s or 90s and geeky types might have been heroic, but it was always despite them being geeky, not because of it. Like it came with social baggage they needed to overcome vs being their source of power.
There's a subfield called soft robotics, which Baymax from the film Big Hero 6 was inspired by: http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2014/october/october29_baymax.html.
I think this is happening to a degree. I know of a guy, whose younger brother started reading up on physics after Big Hero 6.
Also didn't older tech-related movies on hackers inspire some of us?
I saw Greg Nichols give a talk about this at the UICC [0] this year. It was a very entertaining talk covering the business and technical aspects of this project.
From the start the art team on Big Hero 6 wanted to make a really big movie. They envisioned those big sweeping shots of San Fransokyo that made the technical folks shudder. They have a massive rendering farm at their disposal but still probably wouldn't be able to render all the shots in time for the release; for one reason, because the art folks kept making changes, and for another, because they contain so many entities. A handful of folks on the rendering team built a proof-of-concept renderer with support for the global-illumination look they wanted while also being able to handle the massive scale.
As the linked article mentions, the solution was to optimize a massively-parallel algorithm by finding coherent rays that can be efficiently calculated together. It's a batch method: start casting a bunch of rays, identify similar rays and group them, calculate collisions for each group, cast reflected rays, identify similar rays and group them, etc. What I like about it conceptually is that in a way it treats light as a field rather than as individual directed rays.
Their initial tests were rendering an infinite plane of generated buildings. The dystopian metropolis was mesmerizing, and I think Disney would be wise to come up with some dark plot line to set there. Anyway, someone way at the top (the director or art director I think) saw the proof-of-concept renderings and decided that it was the perfect tool to attain their vision of this movie, which, by the way, has a hard release date something like three months away.
So they proceeded to turn the proof-of-concept into a production-grade renderer in time to render all the frames and save the movie. And somehow they pulled it off, they released a really beautiful movie, and they wrote a paper about it, too.
[0]: http://www.acm.uiowa.edu/uicc/speakers.html#nichols
American Sniper is?
But it drops off the list I think when you look internationally. Your links are domestic.
http://deadline.com/2015/03/big-hero-6-600-million-third-biggest-disney-animated-film-ever-international-box-office-1201388358/
http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Hunger-Games-Mockingjay-Part-1-The#tab=summary
http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/American-Sniper#tab=summary
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6
Of which only 10 is original.
For Big Hero 6 we also translated and replaced all of the Japanese text in San Fransokyo with Chinese and Korean for the Chinese and Korean markets. By "text" I mean all of the CG signs, posters, and environmental set dressing in the actual movie (not just the dialogue).
We literally had to re-render the entire movie for each translation. Disney Animation takes these translations very seriously :-)