From The Hip | Why Disney's upcoming animated film may be one of the studio's most important

Big Hero 6, the upcoming 54th Disney animated feature, is an important film in many ways.

It will be the latest entry in Disney’s impressive cartoon canon, standing alongside animated heavyweights like Aladdin, The Lion King, and the studio’s recent hit, Frozen.

It will also be the first Disney animation to be adapted from a Marvel property, which in this case is a little-known comic book that first debuted in 1998. Considering that Disney has owned Marvel’s repertoire of characters since 2009 but been fairly slow at integrating them into animation, memorabilia and the theme park business, it’s about time. 

But most important of all, Big Hero 6 will be one of the very few Disney animated features to star protagonists of colour.

In the original Marvel comics, Big Hero 6 refers to a team of superheroes that act as the protectors of Japan. In the upcoming film, which is due for a November release in the US, the team has been re-imagined in a more international setting that is still rooted in Asian imagery – “San Fransokyo”, a city designed to be a mishmash of San Francisco and Tokyo iconography.

At the centre of the film is Hiro Hamada, a teenage robotics expect who builds a friendly robot named Baymax and assembles a team of heroes to combat crime.