This movie is a touching exploration of grief, a movie where the nerds become the superhero, and a movie that celebrates technology both in the story and in the advances in computer animation. A movie by geeks for geeks. To quote the one character: "How cool is that!"
Here are a few fascinating articles on the animation. It is interesting to see the effort Disney is putting in to advancing computer animation. Frozen included some amazing advances to render snow and trees like never before. It was an amazing success. Now DA is pushing the boundaries again with advances in computer power to render complex light, whole cities, and swarm computerbots.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/trav...on-process-for-big-hero-6-20141020-story.html
http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/?ncid=rss_truncated
"To put the enormity of this computational effort into perspective, Hendrickson says that Hyperion "could render
Tangled from scratch every 10 days.
If that doesn't drive the power of Disney's proprietary renderer home, then consider this: San Fransokyo contains around 83,000 buildings, 260,000 trees, 215,000 streetlights and 100,000 vehicles (plus thousands of crowd extras generated by a tool called Denizen). What's more, all of the detail you see in the city is actually based off assessor data for lots and street layouts from the real San Francisco."
"In a way,
Big Hero 6 is a love letter to technology. It's a fantasy film that gives audiences a knowing wink toward the robot-assisted near-future, as if to say, "This is exactly where you're headed. And it's coming soon."
Big Hero 6 also represents a perfect storm for Disney: The subject matter (makers and robotics) and setting (hyper-tech San Fransokyo) dovetailed with the economic feasibility of cutting-edge computational hardware (that massive render farm) and the development of advanced animation techniques (Hyperion). It's a film for, by and from lovers of technology."