Movie Review - Big Hero Six

Background
So Disney came out with an animated super hero movie from a branch of the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) and I, somehow, missed taking Xander to see it in the theaters.  I mean I know what happened.  It came out in November and money was a little tight so we did not get a chance to see it in theaters.

We saw the ads for the movie and I was actually pretty surprised to hear it was from the MCU.  Since their disastrous (in retrospect) decision to sell the rights to most of their well-known series (Spiderman, X-Men and of course the Fantastic Four) Marvel has done a very good job of keeping their products in house...yet here was a title being made by Disney.  Then of course it hit me that Disney and Marvel are pretty much joined at the hip through corporate overlords and it did not surprise me anymore.

Anyway, the movie recently came out on iTunes and we went ahead and purchased it.  We watched it a bit ago, and while Xander at first was not that interested in watching, he was hooked by about the halfway point.

The Movie
So the movie is your typical origin story.  Hiro (pronounced Hero of course) is an orphan tech genius.  His older brother tries to harness that genius and get him to attend the local university, introducing him to all of his friends AND their mentor who is a tech genius in his own right.  Hiro immediately gets to work trying to invent something new and exciting so he can get into the school and work in the same computer lab as his brother.  After a ton of failures, he finds success, and on the day of his great triumph disaster strikes and his brother AND the mentor are killed in an explosion.

Disillusioned, Hiro mopes around until he meets his brothers greatest accomplishment - a medical droid named Baymax.  Together they discover that the explosion that killed Hiro's brother might not have been an accident...someone was trying to steal Hiro's invention and the fire was a cover story.  Turning his new friends, and the medical droid into a super hero team named the Big Hero Six they attempt to catch the person who stole the technology and killed the brother.

Add in a couple of red herrings and a (honestly) thrown together third act and you have the makings of a super hero / detective movie.

What did I think?
Actually - Loved it.   It was silly and heartfelt and hit all the right notes along the way.  I think that has really been Marvel's secret for the past few years.  Since they sold the rights to many of their more well known series they have had to make do with lesser known teams.  This (and honestly Guardians of the Galaxy - which deserves its own post) is a group I had never heard of before the movie and yet with good storytelling, stunning visuals and just the right amount of humor they have you suddenly looking for their comics.