The team behind Big Hero 6 is not getting near enough credit for their efforts to diversify their storytelling and the expert way they carry it off. Despite the many articles about the diversity in the cast in the film, it doesn’t seem to be talked about much. I guess because where there’s controversy there’s conversation. There wasn’t much controversy around the film because it set its own bar so high.
For one of the first times in a major Disney film, the cast of Big Hero 6 represent various gender and ethnicities and refuse to fall into stereotyping, especially with the females. While the main story, like every story almost, centers around a singular male who overcomes (insert obstacle here) to succeed, he doesn’t do it alone. He needs help.
The film ended up making around $218 at the box office so far, and considering it wasn’t drawing from a well known brand (but an obscure one) that’s great in today’s climate, especially in a year with the “Oscars so White” hashtag. No one really takes into account the doc category, the short category and the animation category and especially Big Hero 6. The filmmakers and the nominees may be white but unlike the Best Picture category, where you have Alejandro G. Inarritu — a Mexican – making a film 100% cast with white characters, ditto every other film in the lineup with the exception of Selma.
We can’t “fix” Hollywood overnight but it is heartening to see those in the animation branch acknowledging that ticket buyers come from all pockets of this melting pot of a country we have and it’s pathologically unhealthy to always make the story center solely around a white male protagonist. That a film like this could be this successful really does open the door for future projects to at least consider diversity.
It doesn’t seem possible to change the older grownups in the Academy, at least not where Best Picture is concerned, but change starts with young minds. Those minds are already way ahead of the status quo. The Oscar voters have a lot of catching up to do. Those at Disney and at Dreamworks are listening. They have to because in animation you simply can’t afford to be stuck in the past.
