Gallery: Big Hero 6 and the future of animation Gallery Gallery: Big Hero 6 and the future of animation + 5

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Disney's Big Hero 6 has taken the world by storm. Centred on genius teenager Hiro, his robot carer Baymax, and a group of engineering student friends who become unlikely superheroes, it's exploded from a niche Marvel comic to an Oscar-winning hit.

WIRED.co.uk speaks with the movie's head of animation Zach Parrish on the challenges of putting the film together, the evolving and maturing world of feature animation, and how audiences fell in love with a marshmallow robot.


WIRED.co.uk: For the layman, how does a head of animation differ from the director's role on an animated movie?

Zach Parrish: I'm responsible for the character animation team. I'm the manager and artist leader for 85 to 90 artists, and we're responsible for character performance. I say we're the actors and extras of the film; any character movement is done by my team. Our role was to give the animators notes to improve their performance and [ensure] that we're getting what the directors want out of every shot.

You've been animating with Disney since Tangled but started in visual effects. How did you make the leap?

It was a tricky transition but it's very much the same art form. It's just a different toolbox and you need to know which tool to pull out of which box at what time. I think what helped for me was working on <em style="background-color: transparent;">Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs[/i] because it was completely different from the visual effects world I'd been working in. It forced me to change hats but when I got to Disney I had skills with the very cartoony and the very realistic side of things and I just had to think about what toolset to use when to create our "Disney" style.

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Having come up from effects, to animator, to head animator, do you have directorial aspirations?

I would love to direct. It's the ultimate form of creative expression but I'd be very happy to just do this job again. I'm also happy being an animator -- that's what I'm doing on our next project, <a style="background-color: transparent;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zootopia">Zootopia</a>

. I'm back on the box animating shots and that in itself is very creatively fulfilling. So long as I'm contributing to a great story and great characters, I'm happy.


How has it been switching back to an animator role?

Pretty much the first thing I learned stepping back as an animator was that every job is stressful. As a supervisor, you can forget just how hard it is to get that image on the screen.

You're there day in day out giving notes on how to make it better but you don't see how hard it was to get that there in the first place. In some ways, I'm back in my comfort zone getting my shots the way I like them but at the same time animation is very hard and it brings its own stressors. I'm really having a nice time and it's good to be back.

Do you think 2D animation is gone forever at Disney?

I don't think anyone at Disney believes that. It's up to the directors, the whole process is director-run. So it's up to them how the whole thing is done and recently that's been CG.

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The next two projects will be CG as well but 2D has been used in our shorts, it's used in developments and we've had traditional 2D artists working on Frozen and Big Hero 6 giving advice and feedback on traditional animation. It's still very much alive and it's very much an option for any director in the future.


The film is almost a total departure from the comics it's based on, but there's only around a dozen Big Hero 6 issues to draw on. Was keeping to the "canon" ever even a consideration?

We took inspiration from the comics but one of the reasons we chose Big Hero 6 was because we could adapt it to whatever direction we wanted to go or stories we wanted to tell.

Marvel was more than helpful in letting us follow the rules of their universe even though we weren't technically in the Marvel Universe. We kept the character names but we got to tell a fresh and original story that wasn't confined to another Marvel story.

Were you surprised the audience latched on to the characters, especially Baymax, as instantly as they have?

I think we always hope that they will be as connected as we are when we're making them. Baymax was someone who, as we animated, we got really attached to [but] it's like picking a favourite child, to pick a favourite character. It's really interesting to see how children and adults are attracted to Baymax and in part it's because of how simple he is. We learned early on that the less we did with him the better because it allows the audience to project themselves and put their emotions onto his actions. It's an amazing experience to watch people fall in love with something you've been connected to for so long.

How was the voice cast performance recorded?

What we always do is record the voice acting first -- we like to give the actors that freedom. It also helps the animators have the performance fleshed out so we have a guideline on where to go. If we're doing it "blind" it gets limiting. We do a little pickup at the end if there's a word here, an exertion there or a breath that needs to be added, but maybe one percent of the dialogue is recorded that way.

On some films they'll have all the actors in there. We did that on Wreck It Ralph and they played off each other quite a bit. On Big Hero 6, we had Hiro [Ryan Potter] and Baymax [Scott Adsit] in the booth at the same time but usually they were reading with Don [Hall, director] and he was really good at getting them where they need to go, being the other character for them. But for the most part they were separated.

Animation is having a resurgence in success and popularity. Why do you think that is?

I think there are a lot of reasons. The type of storytelling animation has been doing in the last few years has really been pushing the boundaries, and audiences are changing their attitudes about what they expect from animation. Their appetite is growing and their sophistication is changing in terms of what they want from animation, TV and film. I think animation is evolving like all media forms right now; if you don't evolve, you go away.


We never try to make "kid movies" at Disney -- our goal is to touch families in general and make characters you can connect with regardless of age and background. But I hope the art form as a whole can take over any market. I like us to explore stories.

Big Hero 6 was a big step in that direction with deep themes that we tried to explore. How to Train Your Dragon 2 explored some pretty heavy stuff as well. Animation as a whole is trying and doing very well at giving the audience much deeper thematic ideas than we had previously.

Both Big Hero 6 and Dragon 2 used death in their stories, without magic resurrections to soften the blow. Are family audiences more accepting of darker themes now?

I don't think there's any reason to ignore deeper meanings in life and emotion and character. If you do it in a mature and respectful way audiences will respond to it because it is part of life, and how the characters respond to it is a big factor. I think it's great that we're pushing boundaries in that regard and letting audiences think about stuff like that.