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San Fransokyo, Hiro, and Hybridity in Disney's ​Big Hero 6

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• Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Queens College 2017 Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios Kevin L. Ferguson CUNY Queens College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/qc_pubs/205 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] 1 Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios Abstract There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. Instead, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored “digital-surrealism” that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-four feature-length films from Walt Disney Animation Studios, I describe how this method allows for a unique understanding of a film corpus not otherwise available to cinema and media studies scholars. “Technique is the very being of all creation” — Roland Barthes “We dig up diamonds by the score, a thousand rubies, sometimes more, but we don't know what we dig them for” — The Seven Dwarfs There are quite a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, which vary widely from aesthetic techniques of visualizing color and form in shots to data-driven metrics approaches analyzing editing patterns. [Show full text]
• Animated Stereotypes – Animated Stereotypes – An Analysis of Disney’s Contemporary Portrayals of Race and Ethnicity Alexander Lindgren, 36761 Pro gradu-avhandling i engelska språket och litteraturen Handledare: Jason Finch Fakulteten för humaniora, psykologi och teologi Åbo Akademi 2020 ÅBO AKADEMI – FACULTY OF ARTS, PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY Abstract for Master’s Thesis Subject: English Language and Literature Author: Alexander Lindgren Title: Animated Stereotypes – An Analysis of Disney’s Contemporary Portrayals of Race and Ethnicity Supervisor: Jason Finch Abstract: Walt Disney Animation Studios is currently one of the world’s largest producers of animated content aimed at children. However, while Disney often has been associated with themes such as childhood, magic, and innocence, many of the company’s animated films have simultaneously been criticized for their offensive and quite problematic take on race and ethnicity, as well their heavy reliance on cultural stereotypes. This study aims to evaluate Disney’s portrayals of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as determine whether or not the nature of the company’s portrayals have become more culturally sensitive with time. To accomplish this, seven animated feature films produced by Disney were analyzed. These analyses are of a qualitative nature, with a focus on imagology and postcolonial literary theory, and the results have simultaneously been compared to corresponding criticism and analyses by other authors and scholars. Based on the overall results of the analyses, it does seem as if Disney is becoming more progressive and culturally sensitive with time. However, while most of the recent films are free from the clearly racist elements found in the company’s earlier productions, it is quite evident that Disney still tends to rely heavily on certain cultural stereotypes. [Show full text]
• Masculinity in Children's Film Masculinity in Children’s Film The Academy Award Winners Author: Natalie Kauklija Supervisor: Mariah Larsson Examiner: Tommy Gustafsson Spring 2018 Film Studies Bachelor Thesis Course Code 2FV30E Abstract This study analyzes the evolution of how the male gender is portrayed in five Academy Award winning animated films, starting in the year 2002 when the category was created. Because there have been seventeen award winning films in the animated film category, and there is a limitation regarding the scope for this paper, the winner from every fourth year have been analyzed; resulting in five films. These films are: Shrek (2001), Wallace and Gromit (2005), Up (2009), Frozen (2013) and Coco (2017). The films selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the Animated Feature film category tend to be both critically and financially successful, and watched by children, young adults, and adults worldwide. How male heroes are portrayed are generally believed to affect not only young boys who are forming their identities (especially ages 6-14), but also views on gender behavioral expectations in girls. Key words Children’s Film, Masculinity Portrayals, Hegemonic Masculinity, Masculinity, Film Analysis, Gender, Men, Boys, Animated Film, Kids Film, Kids Movies, Cinema, Movies, Films, Oscars, Ceremony, Film Award, Awards. Table of Contents Introduction __________________________________________________________ 1 Problem Statements ____________________________________________________ 2 Method and Material ____________________________________________________ [Show full text]
• Educational and Therapeutic Impact of Contemporary Animated Film Characters on the Viewer Konteksty Pedagogiczne 2(11)/2018, s. 151–163 DOI: 10.19265/KP.2018.211151 www.kontekstypedagogiczne.pl Joanna Mytnik [email protected] University of Bialystok ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3924-8188 Educational and therapeutic impact of contemporary animated film characters on the viewer Introduction From the beginning of its existence, films have been evoking interest and giving inspiration. A motion picture has been a tool for many practition- ers. Educators, psychologists, therapists, and animators have long appreci- ated and used film art in their work. Considering the increasing pervasion of the mass media into human life, its presence in many aspects of human functioning, it is necessary to pay close attention to the power of its influ- ence. It is worth noting that the products of popular culture do not only carry risks. Films created for commercial purposes also serve higher purposes, not just entertainment. Being easier in perception for the viewer at any age (through the frequency of contact with this cultural product), it can influence their emotions more strongly, encourage deeper mental work and stimulate reflection. In this article I would like to focus primarily on the possibilities of supporting upbringing and human development, referring to the assump- tions of film therapy (Kozubek, 2016). According to Depta, “the starting point of educational work with a film should be the use of such films that are most popular among young viewers while increasing their cognitive horizons” (Depta, 1983, p. 165). The potential of contemporary animated films seems to be indisputable in this respect, as will be demonstrated by the analysis of the main factor of their influence on the viewer, namely film heroes. [Show full text]
• Falcon Tips & the Problems of the Day Grade 5 14405 St. Clair Ave., Cleveland OH, 44110 | 216.453.4556 | www.lakeerieprep.org Falcon Tips & The Problems of the Day Grade 5: Day 2 Problems of the Day are designed to help our families and scholars prepare for the Reading requirements as laid out in our state standards. They are created to prompt collaborative discussions between you and your child and help ease the dreaded “Brain Drain”! Work hard on them and have fun with them! A new problem will be uploaded to our social media sites, daily! Falcon Tip • Why is this answer choice the best answer? • What answer choice confuses you? • What strategy did you use to determine the answer? • Can you PROVE IT?! What evidence in the passage supports your answer? Software developers helped Disney make "Big Hero 6" look amazing “Big Hero 6” has been a success for Walt Disney Animation Studios in many ways. Audiences and critics loved it. It won an Oscar and sold more than $500 million in movie tickets. Still, 39,000 might be the more important number for Disney Animation. That's how many hours it took to make the computer software that made the movie possible. The software is called Hyperion. It makes the light in an animated film look more realistic. The light in the movie behaves like it would in the real world. This can make animated films more lifelike or give them a surreal look. Great New Tool For Artists Movies like "Big Hero 6," "Frozen" and "Finding Nemo" are made with computer animation. Computers are used to draw the characters and scenery and make it look like they are moving. [Show full text]
• David E. Fluhr, CAS Dialog/Music Re-Recording Mixer Manager: Michal Marks, President, a Muse Management 310-990-1777 ▪ [email protected] David E. Fluhr, CAS Dialog/Music Re-Recording Mixer Manager: Michal Marks, President, A Muse Management 310-990-1777 ▪ [email protected] Selected Credits with Director/Picture Editor/Production Co. FULL CREDITS AND REFERENCES AVAILBLE ON REQUEST Big Hero 6 - Don Hall, Chris Williams/Disney Animation Get on Up - Tate Taylor/Michael McCusker/Imagine Entertainment Saving Mr. Banks - John Lee Hancock/Mark Livolsi/Walt Disney Pictures Frozen - Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee/Jeff Draheim/Disney Animation Planes - Klay Hall/Jeremy Milton/Disney Animation Paperman - John Kars/Lisa Linder/Disney Animation Wreck It Ralph - Rich Moore/Tim Mertens/Disney Animation Dorothy Of Oz - Dan St. Pierre/Summertime Entertainment The Odd Life Of Timothy Green - Peter Hedges/Andy Mondshein/Walt Disney Pic Glee Live 3D - Kevin Tancharoen/Fox The Vow - Michael Sucsy/Nancy Richardson/Spyglass 30 Minutes Or Less - Ruben Fleischer/Alan Baumgarden/Columbia Pictures Justin Bieber Never Say Never 3D - Jon Chu/Paramount Tangled - Nathan Greno & Byron Howard/Tim Mertens/ Disney Animation Step Up 3D - John Chu/Andrew Marcus/Walt Disney Pic The Princess and the Frog - Byron Howard & Nathan Greno/Tim Mertens/Disney Animation Surrogates - Jonathan Mostow/Kevin Stitt/Walt Disney Pic The Jonas Brothers 3D Concert - Bruce Hendricks/ Michael Tronick/Walt Disney Pic The Uninvited (Dialog predubs) - Charles & Thomas Guard/Jim Page/DreamWorks Bolt - Byron Howard & Chris Williams/Tim Mertens/ Walt Disney Pic Hannah Montana 3D Concert - Bruce Hendricks/Michael Tronick/Walt Disney Pic Enchanted (music re-recording mixer) - Kevin Lima/Gregory Perler/Walt Disney Pictures The Guardian - Andrew Davis/Dennis Virkler/Touchstone Pictures Black Snake Moan - Craig Brewer/Billy Fox/Paramount The Great Raid - John Dahl/Pietro Scalia/Miramax Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Garth Jennings/Niven Howie/Spyglass The Lookout - Scott Frank/Jill Savitt/Miramax, Spyglass The Greatest Game Ever Played - Bill Paxton/Elliot Graham/Walt Disney Pictures The Alamo - John Lee Hancock/Eric Beason/Imagine Ent. [Show full text]
• 9781474410571 Contemporary CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD ANIMATION 66543_Brown.indd543_Brown.indd i 330/09/200/09/20 66:43:43 PPMM Traditions in American Cinema Series Editors Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer Titles in the series include: The ‘War on Terror’ and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second Terence McSweeney American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture Michele Schreiber In Secrecy’s Shadow: The OSS and CIA in Hollywood Cinema 1941–1979 Simon Willmetts Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber (eds) Vampires, Race and Transnational Hollywoods Dale Hudson Who’s in the Money? The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood’s New Deal Harvey G. Cohen Engaging Dialogue: Cinematic Verbalism in American Independent Cinema Jennifer O’Meara Cold War Film Genres Homer B. Pettey (ed.) The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film, 1959–1977 Calum Waddell The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy James Fleury, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, and Stephen Mamber (eds) The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film Michelle Devereaux The Other Hollywood Renaissance Dominic Lennard, R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance (eds) Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s Noel Brown www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/tiac 66543_Brown.indd543_Brown.indd iiii 330/09/200/09/20 66:43:43 PPMM CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD ANIMATION Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s Noel Brown 66543_Brown.indd543_Brown.indd iiiiii 330/09/200/09/20 66:43:43 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. [Show full text]
• La Oralidad En Los Tráilers De Películas De Disney TRABAJO FINAL DE GRADO EN TRADUCCIÓN E INTERPRETACIÓN TREBALL FINAL DE GRAU EN TRADUCCIÓ I INTERPRETACIÓ Departament de Traducció i Comunicació TÍTULO La oralidad en los tráilers de películas de Disney Autora: Cristina Giner González Tutor: José Luis Martí Ferriol Fecha de lectura: junio de 2015 2 Resumen: En este trabajo se analiza la oralidad en el doblaje de cuatro tráilers de la factoría Disney: Toy Story (1995), Aladdín (1992), Frozen, el reino del hielo (2013) y Big Hero 6 (2014). Los dos primeros tráilers pertenecen a la época de 1990 y, los dos siguientes, con la época actual. La llamada “oralidad prefabricada” es una característica común en el doblaje al español de textos audiovisuales que busca acercar el discurso presente en los textos audiovisuales al lenguaje oral. De este modo, se busca la similitud del lenguaje utilizado por los personajes al lenguaje oral real y cotidiano. Es decir, se pretende conseguir unos diálogos creíbles y verosímiles que no distraigan al espectador de la historia y que establezcan un vínculo con el público. Analizaremos dicha oralidad basándonos en los cuatro niveles del lenguaje: nivel prosódico, nivel morfológico, nivel sintáctico y nivel léxico-semántico. Además, también realizaremos un estudio diacrónico comparando las dos parejas de tráilers seleccionados y comproba remos qué aspectos han cambiado en cuanto a la oralidad en este tipo de tráilers. Además, en el apartado teórico, justificaremos la pertenencia del tráiler al género publicitario, puesto que estas pequeñas películas no son más que el objeto mediante el cual promociona un producto concreto, una película, en este caso. Palabras clave: Tráiler, doblaje, oralidad, Disney, publicidad 3 4 ÍNDICE Resumen .......................................................................................................................... [Show full text]
• The Dramatis Personae in Big Hero 6 Directed by Don Hall Based on Vladimir Propp Theory THE DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN BIG HERO 6 DIRECTED BY DON HALL BASED ON VLADIMIR PROPP THEORY A THESIS In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the S-1 Degree Majoring American Cultural Studies in English Departement Faculty of Humanities Diponegoro University Submitted by: NOVITA SARI RITONGA 13020115120015 FACULTY OF HUMANITIES DIPONEGORO UNIVERSITY SEMARANG 2019 PRONOUNCEMENT The writer honestly confirms that she compiled this thesis entitled “The Dramatis Personae in Big Hero 6 Directed by Don Hall Based on Vladimir Propp Theory” by herself and without taking any results from other researcher in S-1, S-2, S-3 and in diploma degree of any university. The writer ascertains also that she does not quote any material from other publications or someone’s paper except from the references mentioned. Semarang, July 2019 Novita Sari Ritonga ii MOTTO AND DEDICATION You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. ― Friedrich Nietzsche Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise ― Victor Hugo This thesis is dedicated to Myself As I can finally proves my own ego that hard work will lead me to the more prosperous life iii APPROVAL THE DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN BIG HERO 6 DIRECTED BY DON HALL BASED ON VLADIMIR PROPP THEORY Written by: Novita Sari Ritonga 13020115120015 Is approved by the thesis advisor On August 2019 Thesis Advisor, Retno Wulandari, S.S., MA NIP. 197505252005012002 The Head of the English Department, Dr. Agus Subiyanto, M.A NIP. 196408141990011001 iv VALIDATION Approved by Strata 1 Thesis Examination Committee Faculty of Humanities Diponegoro University On July 8, 2017 Chair Person First Member Arido Laksono, S.S, M.Hum. [Show full text]
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• Dec . 21, 2017 -Jan. 10, 2018 DEC . 21, 2017 -JAN. 10, 2018 FACEBOOK.COM/WHATZUPFTWAYNE • WWW.WHATZUP.COM • FACEBOOK.COM/WHATZUPFTWAYNE ---------------------------- Feature • Savor Fort Wayne --------------------------- Bigger, Better and Lighter By Rachel Stephens ers may be surprised to find a new favorite diner engagement, but also the Star Rewards brunch spot or date scene. Card feature allows participants a chance to Visit Fort Wayne is tweaking the recipe Whether they stick with their favorite win $500 in restaurant gift cards. for the city’s restaurant week to make it even joint or choose a new cuisine experience, Stuck explains how this works: “We tastier in 2018. Savor Fort Wayne will fea- participants will find a unique Savor Fort want to make it as easy as possible; you get ture 47 different restaurants all offering spe- Wayne menu with meals no more than $30 a star for each Savor meal purchased. You 90 YEARS cial pricing options with meals no more than as well as restaurants’ everyday signature get two stars for Savor meals purchased on a $30 per person. spread. weeknight and you get one star for a week- “It is a fun chance to not only try a new One new feature diners will see on their end.” OF FILM restaurant but to also get this great deal,” A nostalgic film series said Emily Stuck, celebrating the Embassy’s program and events manager at Visit Fort historic past Wayne. Friday, Jan. 19 | 7:30pm January 10-21, 2018 is Visit Fort ACK TO THE Wayne’s fifth annual B Savor Fort Wayne FUTURE event. And each year this program gets more and more vi- brant. [Show full text]
• The 2020 Investor Day Programming Fact Sheet THE 2020 INVESTOR DAY PROGRAMMING FACT SHEET ©Disney Today at The Walt Disney Company’s Investor Day event, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy announced an impressive number of exciting Disney+ series and new feature films destined to expand theStar Wars galaxy like never before. Introducing the Disney+ slate, Kennedy said, “We have a vast and expansive timeline in the Star Wars mythology spanning over 25,000 years of history in the galaxy—with each era being a rich resource for storytelling. Now with Disney+, we can explore limitless story possibilities like never before and fulfill the promise that there is truly a Star Wars story for everyone.” Among the 10 projects announced for Disney+ is “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” starring Ewan McGregor, with Hayden Christensen returning as Darth Vader, in what Kennedy called, “the rematch of the century.” Also announced are two new series from Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, off-shoots of the multiple Emmy®-winning “The Mandalorian.” “Rangers of the New Republic” and “Ahsoka,” a series featuring the fan-favorite character Ahsoka Tano, will take place in “The Mandalorian” timeline. Kennedy announced that the next Star Wars feature film, releasing in December 2023, will be “Rogue Squadron,” which will be directed by Patty Jenkins of the “Wonder Woman” franchise. In July 2022, the next installment of the “Indiana Jones” franchise premieres, starring Harrison Ford, who reprises his iconic role. The film is directed by James Mangold. Following are the announced projects, listed in announcement order under the Disney+ and feature film headers: DISNEY+ Ahsoka After making her long-awaited, live-action debut in “The Mandalorian,” Ahsoka Tano’s story, written by Dave Filoni, will continue in a limited series, Ahsoka, starring Rosario Dawson and executive produced by Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau. [Show full text]

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What, where, why is San Fransokyo?

The movie Big Hero 6 takes place in and around a city called San Fransokyo, which is obviously an amalgam of San Francisco and Tokyo.

Is there a explanation why this city exists, both in and out of canon?

In canon, is this our world where somehow Tokyo and San Francisco combined? If so, why and how did this happen, and where is the result located?

Out of canon, was there a reason to exotify San Francisco or westernise Tokyo, instead of picking either city?

• real-location

• Because marketing –  Valorum Commented Jan 24, 2016 at 10:56
• 3 Someone had the brilliant idea of building a really, really long bridge , and voilà! –  Janus Bahs Jacquet Commented Jan 24, 2016 at 11:32
• 1 Fan theory: Big Hero 6 takes place in the same universe as The Man in the High Castle . –  MissMonicaE Commented Mar 17, 2017 at 12:42

The creators of the film are pretty clear that San Fransokyo is based in America, on the site of San Francisco (hence the distinctive landscape, bay and hills). The intention was to pay homage to the fact that the original comic is set in Japan while updating the film for a largely US-based audience. To do so they created a fun " mash-up city "

As to why the city has such an extensive Eastern influence in-universe, it's because of the city's extremely high Japanese population.

Don wanted to figure out a logical explanation for how a mash-up city like this could exist. I came up with the idea that, after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, Japanese immigrants rebuilt the place using techniques that allow movement and flexibility in a seismic event.” Scott Watanabe , Big Hero 6 art director, environments

We can confirm the location from the concept art from the " Art of Big Hero 6 " artbook

and this panel from the deluxe Junior novelisation

• The clip from behind the scenes is a great find; it answers some other questions and confirms some ideas I had as well. (Yes, he was designed after a bell). –  SQB Commented Jan 24, 2016 at 12:17
• Also, herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/… –  SQB Commented Jan 24, 2016 at 13:49

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How Science Influenced the Creators of Big Hero 6

The visionaries behind walt disney animation studios’ big hero 6 , directors don hall and chris williams and producer roy conli, immersed themselves inside a brand-new world….

. . . one that sounds somewhat familiar, yet slightly off—San Fransokyo. This Friday, November 7, audiences around the world will travel to the high-tech locale, and meet Hiro, Baymax, and the rest of the Big Hero 6 cast.

Director Patrick Osborne Talks About the Latest Disney Dog in Feast ►

But before the film hits the big screen, the trio talks to D23 about their experience (they went to Tokyo and San Francisco for their research trips!) and other stories from production.

Live-action superhero films often make audiences feel like their movies’ powerful figures exist in our world, but you don’t quite have those constraints with animation. How does that affect the direction you take with this kind of story? RC: I wouldn’t say we don’t have those constraints because one of the big tenets that we work under is we want to make our story logical. We did an amazing amount of research, from the medical aspects of Baymax to the powers of what superhero suits can do; it’s all kind of based on actual science. And early on, we spent a fair amount of time at Carnegie Mellon and MIT. I think it’s really important to base your story in the truth.

How were you able to find a perfect balance between Eastern and Western styles? Don Hall (DH): It was actually kind of a fun challenge. John [Lasseter, chief creative officer, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios] is always encouraging us to create new worlds, and we could’ve set the story in San Francisco or Tokyo, but the idea of kind of making up our own world was far too enticing. We feel that it’s creatively more fun to set this story in a world that’s more of a mash-up. And once we went on our research trips to Tokyo and San Francisco, things would just start popping up. It gave us nice guidelines to follow.

How did your team work together with Marvel to bring this story to life? DH: Marvel really encouraged us to take Big Hero 6 and just do our thing with it. And from the beginning, they were very, very gracious with their property to let us do that. Roy Conli (RC): It’s been great because Joe Quesada and Jeph Loeb, who are two major creative players at Marvel, would come to all of our screenings and share notes with us. It’s just been an amazing relationship.

What was so special about the journey of making Big Hero 6 ? Chris Williams (CW): I’ve been here 20 years, and every movie is exciting because each presents us with its own set of challenges. And a lot of this journey involved finding the personality of this movie that would be all encompassing, that would make everything play nicely together. We challenged each other a lot, and there was a lot of wiggling, changing, and adjusting. Then we got to this place where it’s like, “Hallelujah, it works, all these things work!” It’s like a meal. You can have all these wonderful ingredients, but you can’t just pour them in the same amount in the meal and expect it to taste good. You have to kind of balance it out and figure out what’s there!

What did you find that you could do with a superhero story through animation that makes it unique and different from live action? DH: It was really important early on that nobody’s really super powerful. Nobody can fly; nobody got bombarded with gamma rays or, you know, cosmic rays or anything else. The characters are all normal people who are really smart and have access to technology. And so I thought that was important because I wanted to ground it in a certain reality and put limitations on the characters. Go Go, for instance, racing around on these sort of magnetic wheels at supersonic speeds, gave animators a lot of freedom to come up with really cool ways to make her move. And even Baymax—making him so simple and elegant, and not having a mouth. This challenged our team and enabled them to express things with very few of the sort of bells and whistles that they normally do with that. These are things that wouldn’t have been pulled off in live-action that we could pull off better in animation. CW: We were able to caricature a little bit more as well. We pare things down to a more simple truth, and sometimes that can just mean that the particular action scene or an action moment is really crystallized down to its most awesome form.

Could you maybe give us an example from a Story Trust meeting of an “Aha!” moment that helped shape what you were doing with Big Hero 6 ? RC: I could relate one incident where there was a spark that actually drove everyone to start thinking in a different way, and that was when we had an off-site—a day after a screening when we put ourselves in a room and just start brainstorming. For this day in particular, we brought in several social workers to talk about loss amongst teenagers [spoiler alert!]. At the end of those three hours, we were buzzing and the Story Trust was there at the time, and we just started throwing out ideas. I think it really helped focus the film in terms of the thematic [elements]. And certain things evolved or devolved. It was just a really exciting time though, because we found the root of who Hiro was and what Hiro was going through, and how Baymax could help him.

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Review: In ‘Big Hero 6,’ Disney does Marvel

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As the Disney-Marvel mash-up “Big Hero 6" moves toward its big-action finale, the images will look strikingly familiar. A supervillain wreaks havoc. A portal to another dimension looms. A showdown goes airborne over a metropolis.

It could be the finale of a dozen superhero films, with one difference: “Big Hero 6" is animated. But the majority of comic-book films are also computer-generated, particularly their large set pieces. Never has that been clearer than witnessing just how similar such scenes look as out-and-out cartoons. It’s a little like seeing that the superhero has no clothes.

The 3-D “Big Hero 6" is loosely based on a little-known Marvel comic about a team of superheros. Crafting a more kid-friendly version, Disney (which owns Marvel) has focused on one of the heroes, the aptly named Hiro Hamada (voiced by Ryan Potter).

With his older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney) and their aunt Cass (Maya Rudolph), the 14-year-old Hiro lives in San Fransokyo, a beautifully rendered fusion of Tokyo and San Francisco, full of both nighttime neon and steep-hilled, Bay-area panoramas.

Hiro, whose parents died when he was a toddler, is an avid gamer happy to use his technical wizardry hustling unwitting competitors in underground “bot fights.” His tiny, gingerbread man-sized robot makes mincemeat of more hulking machines.

Tadashi disapproves but doesn’t lecture Hiro, instead casually exposing him to his college, San Fransokyo Tech. Though Hiro initially dismisses it as “nerd school,” he discovers it to be a vibrant breeding ground of invention. He’s wowed by Tadashi’s schoolmates — Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), Gogo (Jamie Chung) and Fred (T.J. Miller) — and their gizmos.

None is more impressive than Tadashi’s robot, a marshmallow balloon “personal health care consultant” named Baymax (Scott Adsit), created with a “non-threatening, huggable” design. He’s like an Obamacare dream, had the president drifted off during a Michelin commercial.

With a quick scan, he can diagnose any ailment. Looking Hiro over and detecting mood swings, he pronounces: “Diagnosis: Puberty.” When his battery life wanes, he loses air pressure and begins to drunkenly slur his speech.

In short, he’s an irresistible Disney supporting player, one who will give Groot, the soulful treelike alien of “Guardians of the Galaxy,” a run for sidekick-of-the-year.

After a mysterious fiery accident at an invention showcase, Hiro and Baymax set off on an adventure that will gradually gather all the expected superhero conventions, slowly draining the movie’s innovative Silicon Valley spirit.

So buoyant is the first half of “Big Hero 6" and so colorful is its bright, Japanese anime-inspired palette, that the film’s slide into familiar comic book-movie ruts comes as a disappointment. Could it not have stayed in its rich robotics world as a high-tech high-school tale? Are such Earth-bound stories no longer possible for big-studio animation? Can’t a kid grow up without flying up?

Directed by Don Hall (“Winnie the Pooh”) and Chris Williams (“Bolt”), “Big Hero 6" is a fine blend of sweetness and spectacle, East and West. The meeting of Disney and Marvel sensibilities, though, is a more mixed union. When the young Hiro and the lovable Baymax strap on the body armor, girding for battle, the movie’s charms are camouflaged.

“Big Hero 6" is preceded by a lovely little short, “Feast,” a tale of a Boston Terrier’s devotion to his owner, told exclusively, and cleverly, through mealtime. It makes for a tasty appetizer.

“Big Hero 6,” a Disney release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for “action and peril, some rude humor and thematic elements.” Running time: 95 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

MPAA definition of PG: Parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

• DOI: 10.1145/2775280.2792521
• Corpus ID: 7488766

Big Hero 6: into the portal

• D. Hutchins , Olun Riley , +3 authors Michael Kaschalk
• Published in SIGGRAPH Talks 31 July 2015
• Computer Science, Physics
• ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Talks

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6 Citations

Fractal multiverses in vr, a shape modulus for fractal geometry generation, real-time rendering of complex fractals, a generalized constitutive model for versatile mpm simulation and inverse learning with differentiable physics, baymax – the healthcare robot, into the portal: directable fractal self-similarity, one reference, residual ratio tracking for estimating attenuation in participating media.

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Confessions of a Paranoid Humanities Scholar:

On big hero 6 and interstellar.

A couple of weeks ago I parked next to an SUV covered in decals all warning about the coming “zombie apocalypse.”  I chuckled, largely because I’ve never had a moment’s worry about zombies.  But there is another transformation taking place in our culture that’s leaving me feeling a bit like Richard Matheson’s last man on Earth from I am Legend .   Strangely enough, it all has to do with the rising popularity of science.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love science.  I’ve always been fascinated by it, even though I often have no idea what any of it means.  When I learn something new, I tend to gape in wide-eyed wonder like a six-year-old kid at a magic show.  Super colliders?  Black holes?  We might as well be talking about midi-chlorians.  I always made good grades in school, but that was because I knew how to study for tests.  Real comprehension?  That was something else.

The thing that always made science difficult for me was the real-world, practical nature of it.  Studying a chapter in a book was easy enough, but lab experiments were hopeless. What does this chemical smell like?  What color is the mixture? I could never tell.  I could label all the organs in a diagram of a crawfish, but when I had to cut one open, it was all just … mush.

That’s why I gravitated towards the humanities.  Literature, art, music, philosophy, theology, history—these were comfortable subjects for me because, unlike science, they were very imprecise disciplines.  There weren’t right or wrong answers—only right and wrong ways of answering.  Why does Hamlet delay killing Claudius?  Do the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few? The humanities were all about finding some intellectual wiggle room, posing questions you could speculate about, knowing there would never be just one answer.

And for the most part, humanities-style thinking has dominated our popular culture.  Most of our movie heroes find themselves struggling with moral uncertainties and self-doubt.  Gary Cooper, in High Noon , has to find the courage to defend a town that refuses to help him. Rocky Balboa suffers a tremendous beating in order to discover his own sense of self-worth.  Ryan Gosling has to decide whether to violate his code and get involved in Drive .  These are the dilemmas that speak to those of who are wired for the humanities.

But lately it seems like the sciences are trending everywhere—science as a concept, science as a hobby, science as a philosophy.  It’s hard to go anywhere on the Internet without seeing the smiling, genial face of Neil deGrasse Tyson, looking every bit like the kind of guy I would’ve tried to partner up with in lab class, happily playing Igor to his Frankenstein.  And certainly, the movie theaters seem dominated by science-related stories.  This fall, as part of the awards-season, two of the most anticipated films are biopics of famous 20 th -Century scientists, Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing.

All these thoughts came home to me this week after making two trips to the theater.  The first film was a family affair, Disney’s latest animated feature, Big Hero 6 , and the next day I followed it up by seeing Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar .  In terms of tone and audience, these two films couldn’t be more different, but both focus almost exclusively on the world of science, and both feature characters that factor into the story, not because of their inner struggles or moral dilemmas, but rather because of the things they know.

Big Hero 6 is based on a Marvel Comic, though I’ll admit I had never heard of it until now.  The story focuses on Hiro, a boy with a special aptitude for robotics who teams up with several young inventors from a so-called “nerd school” in order to catch a criminal.  Virtually every character in the story is either a scientist, inventor, or student of science, and part of the drama hinges on the struggle between pure research and applied science.

Predictably, Interstellar also features a heavy dose of science since it involves a space mission through a wormhole.  However, this isn’t one of those science fiction action movies where half the characters are supposed to be everyday Joes like Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto in Alien .  Everyone in Interstellar is either a high-level scientist or engineer.  Michael Caine and Jessica Chastain play the kinds of scientists who, like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind , can fill up entire chalkboards with long formulas and algorithms full of signs and variables that might as well be in a foreign language.

All of this makes me wonder if we’re moving away from humanities-based characters.  For me, a humanities-based hero digs down inside himself or herself and struggles to do the right thing.  As characters, they are driven towards the discovery of meaning.  Science-based heroes, on the other hand, figure things out in order for the right thing to happen.  Thus, Sherlock Holmes would be a science-based hero, as would Mr. Spock.  Their actions are driven towards the discovery of empirical, demonstrable truth.

Admittedly, this sounds overly simplified and reductionist, even to me and I wrote it.  But these are ideas I just started kicking around during the last 24 hours, so they are still pretty raw.  What’s striking about both Big Hero 6 and Interstellar is the way in which each film attempts to combine humanities elements with the scientific perspective.  In Big Hero 6 , the two main characters are Hiro, the robotics prodigy, and Baymax, the vinyl-covered medical robot who provides the “muscle” for Hiro.  Despite the fact that these two are as scientifically-oriented as they come, the most compelling part of the movie is its heart.

Big Story 6 isn’t all that effective as a superhero movie, but when it focuses on the bond between Hiro and the robot, it reminds me of Brad Bird’s masterful The Iron Giant .  But significantly, as Hiro struggles with feelings of grief and a desire for revenge, it is the creature of science—the gentle robot—who teaches him the principles of peace, mercy, and sacrifice.

Interstellar , as one might expect, is dominated by science, and many of its concepts, such as the relativity of time, are more complex than anything seen in a mainstream popular film in many years.  Nevertheless, Christopher Nolan devotes a considerable amount of time to humanizing the characters so that Interstellar is not just a film about wormholes and relativity; it’s also about fathers and daughters, lost loves and loneliness, regret and hope.

I’m not going to give away any major plot points, but when characters have to make major decisions, they’re often struggling to divorce human sentiment from scientific logic, and at some point or another, almost all of them fail.  Some of those failures are tragic while others are profoundly successful.  Ultimately, whereas Big Hero 6 suggested that positive human qualities can best come from an artificial intelligence, in Interstellar it’s the human emotions that lead the characters to empirical truth.

Perhaps this increased focus on science is a backlash against the moneyed, political interests that have pretended as if empirical truth simply doesn’t matter, buying private scientists and paying them to deny the reality of climate change.  Regardless, both of these films seem designed to appeal to both those who are wired towards science and those of us more in tune with the humanities.

And while I can’t speak for those viewers in the science community, this humanities scholar cried at both … in a good way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Carpenter is a writer, teacher, and recovering coffee addict. He is the author of The British Invasion: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and the Invention of the Modern Comic Book Writer . In addition to producing a weekly column for Sequart for almost two years, he has also written for RogerEbert.com and PopMatters . He has published essays on a variety of writers and artists including Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Jerry Robinson, August Wilson, and Tennessee Williams, and he has taught a wide variety of classes, including Comics, Shakespeare, Modern American Literature, and Screenwriting/Playwriting. He currently teaches at a university in Nashville.

See more, including free online content, on Greg Carpenter's author page .

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Conceptualizing Disney’s ‘Big Hero 6’

Disney Feature Animation’s first Marvel collaboration pins high hopes and big expectations on a little-known comic book.

Disney’s Big Hero 6 is only a couple of months away from hitting theatres and already excitement is brewing. This is the first collaboration between Disney Feature Animation and Marvel, and given the recent box office success of both studios, it’s clear this partnership has the potential to pull in megabucks. It was Don Hall, co-director alongside Chris Williams, who stumbled across the little known comic-book the film is based on. “I was encouraged to explore the Marvel universe,” explained Hall, “and one of the projects I found was called ‘Big Hero 6.’ I’d never heard of it, but I liked the title and its Japanese influences — it just sounded cool.” Disney encouraged the filmmakers to take the existing property and make it their own. “We thought about sticking more closely to the source material,” he added, “but the idea of creating our own world was far too enticing.”

The story is set in the vibrant city of San Fransokyo; an eclectic mix of eastern and western influences. “I thought about [setting the movie in] San Francisco,” recalled Hall, “which is cool, but I thought ‘What if it was San Francisco mashed up with Tokyo?’ It felt more interesting as a setting. More playful and exotic. And the visual possibilities of those two cities mashed together, which are pretty different aesthetically, felt like a really cool place to set the story.” The filmmakers took a number of trips to San Francisco and Tokyo, scouring each city for inspiration. Skyscrapers and architecture were obvious sources, but the team was also impressed by the attention to detail in things like manhole covers as well as street and building detailing. They channeled all of their research into an early vis-dev test of the bustling cityscape.

Because the world of the story is based on a real city, much of the geography of San Francisco was carried across. In fact, many of the buildings and landmarks in the city of San Fransokyo are based on real places. Take Aunt Cass’s Cafe for example, which is one of the key locations in the film. This building was based on a real place in San Francisco that the filmmakers photographed during one of their research trips. This photograph was passed to the vis-dev team who tweaked and refined the design of the building to better fit into the world of the story.

The film centers around 14-year-old robotics genius Hiro Hamada. His older bother Tadashi is a student at the prestigious San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, which Hiro, being a typical teenager, doesn’t think is cool. He’s way more interested in using his talents to win underground bot fights. But Tadashi manages to persuade Hiro to apply to the Institute, and Hiro agrees to present to them his latest project - mind controlled Microbots. “Tadashi is a smart mentor,” notes Producer Roy Conli. “He very subtly introduces Hiro to his friends and what they do at San Fransokyo Tech. Once Hiro sees Wasabi, Honey, Go Go and even Fred in action, he realises that there’s a much bigger world out there that really interests him.”

Lead character designer Shiyoon Kim describes Hiro as having a combination of eastern and western influences while maintaining that Disney appeal. He also described him as a typical teenager. “When I was developing the character designs for Hiro I was thinking a lot about teenagers of today, and myself when I was a teenager,” explained Kim. “I imagined Hiro to be very plugged into technology and always multi-tasking. The initial character designs reflected that.”

After a terrible tragedy at the Institute Hiro’s world is thrown into chaos. This is when he meets Baymax, a medical robot created by his brother Tadashi. This unique character, a robot unlike anything we’ve seen before, was actually inspired by real life experimental technology. “We had some really great conversations about robots in pop culture,” says Hall. “And I learned that scientists were actually researching soft robotics, including this vinyl arm that was inflatable and non-threatening. It could do simple things like brush somebody’s teeth, but the possibilities were endless.” By the time Kim was brought in to design Baymax, Hall and Williams had a pretty good idea of where they were going. “I remember Don saying he wanted Baymax to be this huggable inflatable robot,” explained Kim. “This isn’t something you get asked for every day!”

Following in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Frozen , this is an exciting and important release for Disney. The filmmakers are clearly passionate about the property. “There are a lot of people here at the studio who love Disney animation and love Marvel comics,” commented Hall, “so you can imagine the excitement when those two kid’s got together.” Producer Roy Conli was equally hopeful about the Disney/Marvel partnership. “The original source material gave us six very interesting and brilliant kids that we could explore,” he said. “And because we decided to take them into a heightened world, we were able to reinvent the characters for today’s audiences.”

Big Hero 6 hits theatres November 7, 2014 (USA).

Paul Younghusband is a producer and writer based in Los Angeles. He has currently served as editor of Visual Magic Magazine, and has contributed to publications such as VFX World and Animation World Magazine .

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AP Research

Ap research course and exam description.

This is the core document for the course.

Course Overview

AP Research, the second course in the AP Capstone experience, allows students to deeply explore an academic topic, problem, issue, or idea of individual interest. Students design, plan, and implement a yearlong investigation to address a research question. Through this inquiry, they further the skills they acquired in the AP Seminar course by learning research methodology, employing ethical research practices, and accessing, analyzing, and synthesizing information. Students reflect on their skill development, document their processes, and curate the artifacts of their scholarly work through a process and reflection portfolio. The course culminates in an academic paper of 4,000–5,000 words (accompanied by a performance, exhibit, or product where applicable) and a presentation with an oral defense.

Participate in the AP Capstone Diploma Program

To offer AP Research, schools must sign up to participate in AP Capstone , and teachers need to attend mandatory summer training. Visit the AP Capstone Diploma program page for more information.

Course and Exam Description

This is the core document for the course. It clearly lays out the course content and describes the assessment. The CED was updated in fall 2023 to include the AP Capstone policy on the use of generative AI.

Course Resources

Ap research course overview.

This resource provides a succinct description of the course and exam.

AP Capstone Diploma Program: An Overview

Only schools participating in the AP Capstone Diploma™ Program may offer AP Seminar or AP Research. Learn how the program works and how it benefits students and schools.

Guide for Hosting Student Presentations in AP Capstone Courses

AP Capstone presentations can be delivered in a remote or in-person setting. 

Course Content

Based on the Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe) model, the curriculum framework is intended to provide a clear and detailed description of the course requirements necessary for student success. This conceptualization will guide the development and organization of learning outcomes from general to specific, resulting in focused statements about content knowledge and skills needed for success in the course.

The AP Research curriculum is made up of five big ideas. As always, you have the flexibility to organize the course content as you like.

• Big Idea 1: Question and Explore
• Big Idea 2: Understand and Analyze 
• Big Idea 3: Evaluate Multiple Perspectives
• Big Idea 4: Synthesize Ideas
• Big Idea 5: Team, Transform, and Transmit

Skill Categories

The AP Research framework included in the course and exam description outlines distinct skills, called transferrable skills and proficiencies, that students should practice throughout the year.

Skill	Proficiencies
Produce Scholarly Work	Demonstrating the significance of one’s research by explaining the rationale behind the choices made in the research process and logically connecting the findings to one’s conclusions or new understandings Evaluating the significance of the findings, results, or product to the purpose or goal of one’s inquiry and strategically choosing such evidence to effectively support claims
Employ Research Practices	Narrowing a focus of inquiry and identifying an aligned, ethical, feasible approach or method to accomplish the purpose of the research question and/or project goal
Analyze Sources and Evidence	Analyzing evidence for what is known about one’s topic of inquiry to further focus and situate one’s research question or project goal Evaluating the credibility, relevance, and significance of sources and evidence to the choices made in the inquiry process
Understand Context and Perspective	Contextualizing the purpose and significance of one’s topic of inquiry within a broader field or discipline
Communicate (interpersonal and intrapersonal)	Choosing and employing effective written and oral communication techniques, considering audience, context, and purpose to convey and defend conclusions or new understandings Choosing and consistently applying an appropriate citation style and effective conventions of writing Working constructively with others to accomplish a team goal or task Identifying challenges, successes, and moments of insight throughout one’s inquiry, which transformed one’s own thinking and reasoning

AP and Higher Education

Higher education professionals play a key role in developing AP courses and exams, setting credit and placement policies, and scoring student work. The AP Higher Education section features information on recruitment and admission, advising and placement, and more.

This chart  shows recommended scores for granting credit, and how much credit should be awarded, for each AP course. Your students can look up credit and placement policies for colleges and universities on the  AP Credit Policy Search .

Meet the AP Research Development Committee

The AP Program is unique in its reliance on Development Committees. These committees, made up of an equal number of college faculty and experienced secondary AP teachers from across the country, are essential to the preparation of AP course curricula and exams.

AP Research Development Committee

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Why Does It Take A Movie Robot To Show What Nurses Really Do?

Kelli Dunham

Baymax the robot nurse becomes Hiro's fierce defender in the hit movie Big Hero 6 . Disney/AP hide caption

Baymax the robot nurse becomes Hiro's fierce defender in the hit movie Big Hero 6 .

I'm a proud nurse from a proud family of nurses, yet I would never claim that a layperson would enjoy watching mainstream medical dramas with us. We end up yelling at the screen: "There is nothing about that sexy get-up that remotely resembles a nursing uniform," and "Doctors don't fire nurses, nurse managers fire nurses," and "No emergency room nurse would ever have to be told by a doctor to start CPR!"

So when the Baymax, the nurse/robot in the hit Disney movie Big Hero Six turned out to be reasonable, competent and not dressed in fishnet stockings, I was thrilled.

You know your profession has an image problem when you point to a balloonish animated robot doll and say, "Yes, that's good. That accurately reflects what I do on a daily basis. More representations like that, please."

Baymax might not look like any nurses you know, but unlike most nurse characters in the media he actually provides nursing care. He assesses the health condition of his charge, the boy-genius Hiro, makes recommendations related to his health and teaches him about his neurochemical processes.

Once Hiro reprograms Baymax with fighting capabilities, Baymax becomes Hiro's terrifying defender. If you've ever heard a nurse on the phone with an insurance company insisting that a patient get needed care paid for, you know this is not a misplaced metaphor.

Contrast this with the Nurse Dawn character in the HBO comedy Getting On . She has sex with a new nurse manager within hours of meeting him; doesn't seem to notice when a patient dies; cowers submissively in front of even the most incompetent doctors and never seems to provide any actual nursing care because she is too busy with self-created drama and paperwork.

Or the Nurse Beverly character in Fox's comedy The Mindy Project . She is fired from an office medical practice for incompetence, breaks a doctor's nose in angry response, and when she is rehired in a clerical position expresses relief that she finally has a job where she doesn't have to wash her hands.

Or the nurses in the Fox medical drama House . Rather than being sexually inappropriate or incompetent, these nurses all seem to be on a series-long coffee break. It is the doctors who are shown providing nursing care: starting IVs, doing patient teaching, negotiating complicated family dynamics at the bedside.

Even when nurses are shown to be competent, compassionate patient-focused experts like Jackie Peyton, the main character in Showtime's Nurse Jackie , the creators aren't satisfied with the life-and-death drama of a high-level trauma center in a huge city. The nurse character has to be an unethical, lying, stealing, not quite-in-recovery drug addict as well.

The argument could be made that it's the job of Hollywood to create fiction of all the professions, and that popular culture gets everything about health care wrong.

Certainly examples of this exist: the new Fox teen drama Red Band Society is populated by exceedingly healthy looking, extremely attractive gravely ill teenagers who live for months in hospital rooms the size of two-bedroom apartments for no other apparent reason than to make it more convenient for them to kiss each other.

Any scenes in which the dying but randy teens are portrayed interacting with medical care (one patient is shown receiving dialysis for liver failure) are so ludicrous that it makes you wonder if the procedure for the show's writers is to ask their medical adviser how something might accurately be conveyed and then write the exact opposite.

Shots - Health News

Nurses want to know how safe is safe enough with ebola.

But even though this is just entertainment, the stakes for the future of nursing are high. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that Americans believe what TV shows say about medical care and health policy.

For 13 years the non-profit advocacy organization Truth About Nursing has been researching and documenting nurse representations in popular culture and has come to the conclusion that "the vast gap between what skilled nurses really do and what the public thinks they do is a fundamental factor underlying most of the more immediate apparent causes of the [nursing] shortage [including], understaffing, poor work conditions, [and] inadequate resources for nursing research and education."

This is bad news for nurses, but worse news for patients. Nurses make the difference in good health care; increased RN staffing decreases the overall patient death rate as well as the rate of hospital acquired pneumonia, falls, pressure ulcers and blood clots after surgery . When nurses show more signs of burnout related to understaffing, postsurgical infections increase.

And there's the hard-to-quantify but essential benefit of being cared for. When I was in the hospital this past January after a life-threatening complication of knee-replacement surgery, I woke up one night in pain and unable to figure out how to move within the many drains, tubes and wires attached to, or inserted in, my body. I muttered an expletive and from around the corner a nurse appeared.

"I'm right here," she said. Even before she started to untangle my IV and troubleshoot better pain management, my panic was instantly calmed.

Baymax's programming won't allow him to disengage until the patient has answered, "Are you satisfied with your care?" in the affirmative. This is inconvenient for the characters in an action adventure movie, but it's a good question to ask in a hospital. If you're satisfied with your care, you may well have a nurse to thank.

Kelli Dunham is a nurse, stand-up comic, LGBT health advocate and author of five books, including the recent tragicomic collection Freak of Nurture (Topside Press, 2013).

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Behind the Scenes of Disney's Tech-Centric 'Big Hero 6'

The technology and the talent behind it are what make Disney's latest animated movie its most complex ever.

Big Hero 6 , slated for release Nov. 7 in the U.S., is Walt Disney Animation Studios' 54th film and the first to really be grounded in, and celebrate, tech culture.

Following Disney's acquisition of Marvel , the characters are drawn from the original comic book series of the same title (though, because this is Disney, they're now younger, sweeter, and, well, less anatomically mature). PCMag was invited to the Big Hero 6 Tech Day at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Burbank, California, to learn more about the film—and the technology that made it possible.

Inventing Hyperion The movie centers on robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada (voiced by Ryan Potter), who's growing up in San Fransokyo, a near-future mash-up of San Fran and Japan. He hangs out with his tech-savvy friends and a chubby, compassionate healthcare robot called Baymax until they stumble upon a plot to destroy the city that involves a terrifying swarm of 20 million microbots controlled by neuro cranial transmitters.

In a nod to the Maker movement , Hiro gets busy in the lab, using whatever raw materials are lying around, doing some nifty programming on LED touch screens, and whipping up body shields, rocket thrusters, armor panels, and maglev discs on his 3D printer. After a montage depicting rapid prototyping and testing with much prepubescent despair, Hiro, Baymax, and their friends are tricked out into a band of high-tech heroes.

Behind the screen, Big Hero 6 is four times more complex than Frozen in the scale of its animation, so Disney needed to ramp up massively. This is the first feature to utilize Hyperion, new state-of-the-art rendering software created by Walt Disney Animation Studios' technology team, in collaboration with production artists. Hyperion has been in development since 2011, but draws on multiple research projects on multi-bounce complex global illumination carried out at Disney's Zurich research lab. Animators can now create frames containing highly accurate simulations of 10 billion simultaneous rays of light as Hyperion calculates the illumination, bounce, shadows, and redirection of every single beam—something that would have been computationally impossible before Hyperion. It is able to do this efficiently even within massively complex scenes by using a novel streaming data architecture.

Hendrickson said that Disney had to build a supercomputing cluster capable of running Hyperion for Big Hero 6 ; it's so big, in fact, that it would rank about 75 on the list of the world's top 500 supercomputers . This cluster comprises more than 2,300 Linux workstations, each of which contains two 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5-2695 v2 processors (for a total of 24 processing cores—and 48 threads—per machine), 256GB of onboard memory, and two 300GB solid-state drives in a RAID Level 0 array—serious hardware needed for the CPU-intensive Hyperion. The whole rig is capable of running 400,000 jobs (visualization, simulation, or rendering) in a 24-hour period, the equivalent of 1.1 million render hours. The storage system that holds the assets and archives all 54 Disney Animation films has a capacity of 5 petabytes (or 5,000 terabytes).

For a system that runs at this mammoth scale all day, every day, for months on end, Hendrickson's first problem was the size of the data center required.

"It turns out that when you're building a machine of this size there are significant power and cooling requirements—we didn't have a data center within Disney that was local that could do that," Hendrickson explained. So they had to co-locate across four centers, three in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco. "It had to be fairly close because of the amount of data that's going back and forth as you're rendering—we need millisecond latency."

Research and Rendering What's impressive about Big Hero 6 is that the tech it depicts is grounded in solid research. The combined story, animation, special effects, and technology teams took several fact-finding trips to Japan and visited the Carnegie Mellon and MIT robotics teams. At MIT they discovered the inspiration for the film's microbots. The Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon established ground rules for Baymax's soft robotics functions.

Codirectors Don Hall and Chris Williams were both Marvel fans and Disney Animation veterans. Williams joined Disney in Florida's animation studio as an intern in 1994 and last directed Bolt in 2008. Hall, who has been at Disney since 1995, last directed Winnie the Pooh in 2011. During their research trips it became clear that Big Hero 6 was going to be a love letter to both Japanese and geek culture.

Hall said that at every robotics lab they visited, the technicians said, "We want a robot hero for once, instead of a villain!" They got one. This movie is stuffed with pop culture references and even though the directors denied it, Baymax (voiced by Scott Adsit) does sound like a slightly less frustrated C-3PO.

The obsessive focus on research extended to the sets themselves. The tech team bought the actual assessor data for San Francisco to create an accurate digital construction of a working city, right down to lot size and the heights of buildings. In Big Hero 6 there are 83,000 buildings, 260,000 trees, 215,000 street lamps (of six different styles), and 100,000 vehicles. "On every other film this would have been a painting," Driskill said.

In the movie there are sequences where the camera zooms and swoops from a massive wide shot then dives deep into the immersive cityscape. As it flies past buildings you'll suddenly see someone leaning out a tiny apartment window above a miniature air conditioning unit. "This is a level of detail never seen before in previous animated movies and is only possible because of Hyperion," Driskill said.

Hendrickson's team also created the software Denizen to enable nontechnical people to craft crowd characters, because they needed a lot of them—one shot alone has 6,000 individual characters. "We released the tool to everyone in Disney Animation and told them to make a version of themselves," Hendrickson said. "People keep watching clips to see if their virtual selves made the final cut."

Zach Parrish, head of animation, explained the complexity for his team of the task at hand. "We created 701 unique characters with 1,324 animation cycles—how they walk, talk, interact—which adds up to 632,124 final animation cycles retargeted for various character variants." Using the 3D animation tool Maya, each animator works with 200 controls to create individual poses and completes about 3 to 4 seconds of footage a week. Ninety animators worked on Big Hero 6 , many for more than two years.

What Hendrickson's team does is solve highly complex technical problems on a daily basis so the creative team can make magic on screen. This means hiring for a very broad range of people.

"When we hire, we look to schools that focus on high-performance computing and have programs that are joint engineering combined with arts programs—there aren't many—but we have to collaborate with people who are both left-brain and right-brain on projects," Hendrickson said. "It's hard for most people to understand that it's not all equations and math. What we're trying to do isn't taught anywhere so we have to figure it out each time. We have plenty of healthy discussion and constant experimentation. We have a history of creating complex tools that have super artist-friendly user interfaces so we don't have to have technology expert people to use them. No other studio does that."

With Big Hero 6 wrapped up, Hendrickson's tech team is moving on to its next problem: fur. "We're in the middle of the next [film], Zootopia , now," Hendrickson said, laughing, "so Hyperion is now rendering lots of fur. Fur is always difficult, especially at scale, and it's not just one furry creature—it's Zootopia ! This is a whole world of fur!"

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About S.C. Stuart

Contributing writer.

S. C. Stuart is an award-winning digital strategist and technology commentator for ELLE China, Esquire Latino, Singularity Hub, and PCMag, covering: artificial intelligence; augmented, virtual, and mixed reality; DARPA; NASA; US Army Cyber Command; sci-fi in Hollywood (including interviews with Spike Jonze and Ridley Scott); and robotics (real-life encounters with over 27 robots and counting).

Read S.C.'s full bio

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Further Reading

AP Research

Learn all about the course and assessment. Already enrolled? Join your class in My AP.

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Go to AP Central for resources for teachers, administrators, and coordinators.

About the Course

In AP Research, you decide what to study. Curious about the impact of AI on society? You can make a project out of that. Are you passionate about social causes? Interested in climate change or mental health? You can research these, as well. In this course, you’ll learn about different research methods and will develop advanced research skills while researching a topic of your choice.

Skills You'll Learn

Conducting independent research

Analyzing sources and evidence

Applying context and perspective

Writing a college-level academic paper

Presenting research findings to an audience

Equivalency and Prerequisites

College course equivalent.

AP Research is an interdisciplinary course that encourages students to demonstrate critical thinking and academic research skills on a topic of the student’s choosing. To accommodate the wide range of student topics, typical college course equivalents include introductory research or general elective courses.

Recommended Prerequisites

Students must have successfully completed the AP Seminar course.

Assessment Date

Wed, Apr 30, 2025

11:59 PM ET

AP Research Performance Task Due Date

Submit your AP Research performance task as final in the AP Digital Portfolio by this date.

Course Content

Big idea 1: question and explore.

You’ll learn about the first step of doing research: inquiry and investigation.

You’ll practice:

• Identifying a problem or issue and developing a question about it
• Finding and organizing the information you need to answer the question
• Evaluating the sources of information you use
• Looking at the problem or issue from different perspectives

Big Idea 2: Understand and Analyze

You’ll learn to read, comprehend, and explain a perspective or argument.

• Reading critically for a purpose
• Explaining and analyzing the line of reasoning of an argument
• Evaluating the evidence an author uses to support their argument
• Assessing potential resolutions, conclusions, or solutions raised by an argument

Big Idea 3: Evaluate Multiple Perspectives

You’ll learn to compare and contrast different perspectives on an issue, idea, or problem so you can understand its complexity.

• Identifying, comparing, and interpreting different perspectives on, or arguments about, an issue
• Evaluating objections, implications, and limitations of different perspectives or arguments

Big Idea 4: Synthesize Ideas

You’ll learn to take information you’ve gathered, analyzed, and evaluated and use it to form your own conclusions and build your own argument.

• Formulating a well-reasoned argument
• Using data and information from various sources to develop and support an argument
• Linking evidence to claims
• Offering resolutions, conclusions, or solutions based on evidence

Big Idea 5: Team, Transform, and Transmit

You’ll learn peer review practices and how to communicate your ideas to an audience.

• Planning, producing, and presenting an argument while considering audience, context, and purpose
• Communicating information through appropriate media
• Using effective techniques to engage an audience

Credit and Placement

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Find colleges that grant credit and/or placement for AP Exam scores in this and other AP courses.

Course Resources

Ap research course and exam description.

This is the core document for the course. It clearly lays out the course content and describes the assessment and the AP Program in general.

AP Daily Videos

Once you join your AP class section online, you’ll be able to access AP Daily videos in AP Classroom. AP Daily videos cover every proficiency and skill outlined in the AP Research Course and Exam Description. Sign in to access them.

What Are Project Based AP Courses?

Learn how project based AP courses take you beyond the textbook and into a world of learning through hands-on exploration.

• Go to College Board Blog

More About Your Course

Participate in the ap capstone diploma program.

Learn more about the AP Capstone Diploma Program, and how you can participate. Taking AP Seminar and AP Research lets you study topics you love, learn key academic skills, and stand out to colleges.

AP Capstone Diploma Program Policies

Understand policies on plagiarism, participation, extended absence, and more for AP Seminar and AP Research students.

See Where AP Can Take You

AP Research can lead to a wide range of careers and college majors

Additional Information