Disney is currently revving up its publicity engine ahead of the 2015 release of ‘Big Hero 6’, the first new animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios since the box-office busting ‘Frozen’. However, if you’re expecting another sweet fantasy tale, with instantly memorable songs, then you may be in for a shock.

Dealing with loss, grief, and puberty, and with a soundtrack from emo-rockers Fallout Boy, ‘Big Hero 6’ could be Disney’s most grown-up animated feature, and therefore one of its riskiest, yet.

It’s the first collaboration between Walt Disney Animation Studios and Marvel since Disney snapped up the comics firm back in 2009 for a whopping £2.8bn, with Marvel involved in the process every step of the way.

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Based on an obscure 1998 series that only hardcore comic fans had ever heard of, ‘Big Hero 6’ exists in a separate world to the live action cinematic universe of ‘The Avengers’, ‘Iron Man’ et al, to save any confusion for audiences, and from early footage it looks like no other animated film that’s come from the “House of Mouse” before.

While Marvel primarily pitches its comic characters to a mid-to-late teenage audience, the animation team that brought us ‘Frozen’ and ‘Tangled’ often skews towards a much younger age bracket, but where will ‘Big Hero 6’ fit on that spectrum?

Somewhere in-between is the short answer.

"I think in this film, you just have a really rich soup of ideas,” explains producer Roy Conli to Yahoo. "What works great is that it works for kids really well and it works for adults extremely well, it’s kind of cool that way."

It’s not dark per se, early footage from the film is every bit as playful and joyous as recent offerings ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ and the aforementioned ‘Snow Queen’ adaptation ‘Frozen’, it’s just a bit more complex to set up and explain, and it deals with some heavy themes.

Warning, potential spoilers ahead.

The story revolves around a 14-year-old robotics prodigy named Hiro who lives in the fictional city San Fransokyo. It’s a mash-up of San Francisco and Tokyo that exists in the future, or if you prefer, an alternate reality to our own.

Hiro’s inspirational brother Tadashi helps him to gain admission into San Fransokyo’s Institute of Technology, and in one of the scenes we saw from early on in the film, Hiro’s “audition” for the elite educational facility sees the child genius demonstrating his technical prowess using Microbots, a tiny army of connecting robots that he designed.

It’s a dazzling sequence that demonstrates visual inventiveness hitherto unseen from Disney. The futuristic-setting, an area of fantasy rarely explored by Disney (we don’t mention ‘Treasure Planet’ round these parts), has given the animators free rein to go as wild as they like.

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