The narrative of the original Big Hero 6 comic series, launched in 1998, was straight-forward enough: in response to the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Japanese government assembled a squadron of superheroes to fight for the Emperor. The team consisted of Hiro, a mini-Tony Stark of sorts; his Godzilla-morphing robot Baymax; Honey Lemon, a cross-dimensional secret agent; Go Go Tomago, an ex-con with a fiery temper—literally; and a couple familiar X-Men faces—Silver Samurai and Sunfire.

Inspired heavily by Japanese culture, readers of the comic book were treated to some pretty out-there characters. For instance, Hiro lost his mom to the Everwraith, a spirit made up of all the dead souls from the nuclear strikes; Honey Lemon wielded a magic purse full of wormholes; and chef-turned-superhero Wasabi No-Ginger's weapon of choice was a sushi knife.

Big Hero 6 was an obscure candidate for Disney’s first animated Marvel movie

But Hiro and his friends didn’t bring in the comic book bucks, and the series was shelved after less than a year. In 2008, X-Men writer Chris Claremont and cover artist David Nakayama briefly brought the team back to life for a limited miniseries, but again the comic saw little success. The under-the-radar series was an obscure candidate for Disney’s first animated Marvel movie.

But the studio was looking in unlikely corners for its next project. "We were on the hunt for something unique, something we hadn’t seen before, but also appealing and huggable," director Don Hall told Bloomberg last month. He found what he was looking for in Big Hero 6.

To make the comic palatable to the American viewer, Hall and his team completely made over the property, transforming it into something that resembles a Disney film through and through. The big picture rendition gravitates towards two members of Big Hero 6: Hiro and Baymax. And in true Disney form, the narrative has been tweaked to center around a tragic death—Hiro loses his brother—and the unlikely friendship between a boy and his robot. If it weren’t for the title card slotted in the movie’s credits, one might never realize that a quirky Marvel comic lay at the movie’s core.

As Walt Disney Animation releases the film in theaters today, we take a look at how Disney re-imagined the heroes of Big Hero 6 for mainstream audiences.