Big Hero 6: The Superhero Film I'd Been Waiting For (In One Sense)

This post contains spoilers for the movie Big Hero 6. If that convinces you to not read this post, just go see it. It's worth it because...I won't spoil it for you. But yeah.

When the very first trailer for Big Hero 6 came out, I was a bit disappointed. It seemed like a story of a boy (who looked white, though I was wrong about that part) who builds a robot and has adventures or fights villains or whatever. My initial thought: "For once, why can't a girl or a person of color build a cool robot?" (Again, I was wrong thinking the boy was white, but nothing in that initial teaser said his name was Hiro.) Despite the Disney + Marvel label, I was very skeptical that this could be anything more than a solidly entertaining film. Boy, was I wrong.

After I saw a few social media posts from progressive/feminist websites about the diversity reflected in the film, it started looking as though I should give this movie a shot. I didn't read any articles to avoid spoilers in case I decided to watch the film, and I remained curious. Finally, a fellow superhero-nerd lady friend convinced me that I absolutely needed to see this movie and that the posts praising the representation of the characters were definitely warranted.

And she was right. Big Hero 6 turned out to be a film that is consciously diverse but is not bogged down by meaningless tokenism or ridiculous tropes.