Like a blow-up Buster Keaton

By Tom Shone

If Apple ever got its hands on Florence Nightingale it might end up with something like Baymax, the big, inflatable white blob at the centre of the new Disney animation “Big Hero 6”. Baymax is a robot caregiver who asks people, “On a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt?” in a soothing, slightly effeminate voice like that of HAL from “2001” (in actuality Scott Adsit from “30 Rock”), and who dispenses hugs that envelop you like a duvet. “It’s like spooning a marshmallow,” says one of the teen heroes of the tale, although adult viewers may find older memories prodded by Baymax’s air of roly-poly befuddlement. When his batteries are low, he lollops drunkenly across the screen like Chaplin on the deck of a rocking boat in “The Immigrant”, and when he gets stuck crawling through a window—that old fat-man routine—he extricates himself by partially deflating himself with a gnat-like “peeooowwww” sound while maintaining a straight face that would be the envy of Buster Keaton. But then deadpan has always been the secret weapon of animators: keeping a straight face is so much easier when you’re nothing but a straight line to begin with.

One of the best reasons to watch kids’ cartoons is to brush up on your physical comedy. You used to be able to tell Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons apart by whether they focused on the character’s face after it was blackened by an exploding bomb or in the last few ticking seconds before. The best of today’s kids’ movies play like silents, from the Chaplinesque pleasures of Pixar’s “WALL-E”, to the first ten, almost completely wordless minutes of “UP”. (Sometimes you feel all they do at Pixar is watch old silent shorts.) “Big Hero 6” doesn’t match the grace of those films, but it’ll do for now with its bright, anime-inspired palette and its architectural mash-up of San Fransisco and Tokyo (tram cars, elevated railway tracks, Victorian Mission duplexes, cherry blossoms). Cynics may detect traces of demographic calculation in the portmanteau city of San Fransokyo, although I sensed as much of a tribute to the tech-industry ingenuity that is both the film’s touchstone and, ultimately, undoing.