The “Enlightened Masculinity” of Kindness and the Power of Love
The ineffable stress ratio between what has been referred to so far as “empowered femininity” and “enlightened masculinity” is emphasized by the amount of courage, steady effort and compassion in the mix leading to victory, as partially outlined by Shonen Jump (the leading magazine among manga/comics publishers in Japan) in 1968 and then repeatedly employed by at least two generations of directors and producers of artistic works of popular culture (initially in Japan and more recently worldwide). One such production is the 3D-animated movie Baymax (2014): its aesthetic and ideological significance as well as media impact resulted from its unexpected, deep-going insights into the workings of late-modern existential philosophy by means of the animated medium. In case of Baymax, the animation movie was appointed to carry messages of a futuristic, though strangely-familiar looking world in which love and kindness become valuable foundations of human behaviors and interactions. (Baymax was released by Walt Disney Pictures as its 54 work in the Walt Disney Animated Classics Series in the US under the title Big Hero 6 on November 7, 2014, after having been premiered previously in Tokyo at the 27th Tokyo International Film Festival on October 23rd, and in Abu Dhabi at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival on October 31st.)
At first sight, Baymax, a huge success both on a critical and on a commercial level, is a cultural product combining Western (US-American) animation styles and Eastern (Japanese) symbolical contents. Moreover, it appears as a translucent and optimist echo of the 1982 neo-noir dystopian science-fiction movie Blade Runner (director: Ridley Scott).[1] The plot is simple and refers, after the exploration of the emotional intricacies of sisterhood in Frozen (released by Walt Disney Pictures one year before, in 2013), to the complex and often rather competitive relationship between brothers. The directors Don Hall and Chris Williams tackle, I would say with graceful realism, the problematic of brotherhood in the absence of a functional family as promoted by classic standards, thus redefining family and family structure as a site of gradual self-discovery. The plot evolves around the main character Hiro Hamada – a quite typical Japanese male name – who is a 14-year old robotics genius living in the futuristic city of San Fransokyo (a concatenation of “San Francisco” and “Tokyo”). Raised by his aunt Cass Hamada and his older brother Tadashi Hamada after the death of his parents ten years ago, Hiro spends his time participating in illegal robots’ fights, until Tadashi takes him to the robotics center of his university where he encounters Tadashi’s friends – all of them robotics nerds: two girls, GoGo and Honey Lemon, and one boy, Wasabi, as well as Fred, a sort of freeloader comic-books fan hanging around in the laboratory. A little later, his brother Tadashi introduces Hiro to Baymax, the healthcare robot he had developed in his quest to help people in need. Inspired by their enthusiastic research activity, by his brother’s soft persuasion methods and by Professor Robert Callaghan’s laid-back encouragement, Hiro decides that he wants to join the team at San Fransokyo Institute of Technology and starts preparing to present a breathtaking innovation that would allow him to enroll.
Originally, Baymax was inspired by the Marvel Comics Superhero team Big Hero 6, but goes far beyond the superficial plot of telling the story of a young robotics prodigy who forms a superhero team to combat a masked villain. Instead, by means of aesthetic conversion and ideological transfer, Baymax displays kindness as a newly discovered driving force on the background of typically Japanese metropolitan landscapes, combined with slightly Victorian atmospheres and home-interior designs. Love is simultaneously reconstructed as a complex emotion comprising compassion, respect, gratitude, loyalty and caring, in a practical attempt to replace the prevailing understanding of love as “romantic love” with the neo-humanist vision of love as authentic “self-love”, as famously stated by Erich Fromm more than six decades ago. Set in a stand-alone parallel universe, in which San Francisco was largely rebuilt by Japanese immigrants in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake which had occurred in 1906 (although this premise is actually never stated in the movie), Baymax combines in the huggable stature of its main robot-character and the lessons learned by its main human character both advanced technology and the retro-feeling embodied by San Fransokyo: its skyscrapers and its adjoining hills, as well as the re-shaping of the Golden Gate Bridge as a juxtaposition of tori-i (entrance gates at Shintô shrines in Japan) and the inclusion of a Nô mask (falsely identified in the movie as “Kabuki mask”) as the identification attribute of the evil character are part of universalization strategies of rites of passages which otherwise might seem immovably connected to a single specific geographic area.
The story is both fun and engaging; in a way, it is a typical coming-of-age narrative line akin to Spider-Man grasping “with great power”. But it transcends it. The audiences do not just watch Hiro struggle as a teenager to define the man he wants to become, in particular after the tragic loss of his elder brother. There is also Baymax, who develops from a robotic nurse to a full sentient being. It is their relationship growth that drives Hiro’s path towards maturity and the core elements of the story. However, rather than its plot, the structure and configuration of the characters are the strongest assets of Baymax. In the first place, Baymax, the healthcare robot, embodies two main elements of sustained efforts in re-defining masculinity in late modernity: On the one hand, there is what one might call the concept of ‘tough cuteness’ as a practical gate into adulthood, as Hiro Hamada, the male teenager whose care Baymax takes over, gradually discovers. On the other hand, the concept of “cool kindness” is intertwined, turning Baymax, the healthcare robot, into a symbol of fruitful cooperation between its non-humanity and its warm empathy, one of the keys to success of Walt Disney Animation since 1929. Through the character of Baymax, this first official feature crossover cooperation between Marvel and Disney combines what the House of Mouse and the House of Ideas do best and unifies them into a warm, funny, heartfelt, riveting adventure film.
The three college nerds – GoGo, Wasabi, Honey Lemon – and Fred, the half-way mysterious mascot at the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, serve both as inspiration and challenge to the young and life-unexperimented Hiro. Each of them portrays one main aspect of the complex personality of a mature man: GoGo is a tough athletic student, definitively a woman of few words. Wasabi is a smart, slightly neurotic young man, actually highly conservative and cautious, obviously the most normal in a group of brazen characters; in the second part of the movie he becomes, in a way, the voice of the audience and points out that what they are doing is crazy, thus grounding the development of the plot by breaking the fourth wall. While being a chemistry enthusiast, Honey Lemon is a ‘glass-is-half-full’ kind of person, with a very specific mad-scientist spark in the twinkle of her eyes. Finally, Fred moves beyond his appearance of a school’s mascot and science enthusiast, and while none of these four characters really changes along the movie, at the obligatory “we need to be a team” type of moment, the tension necessary in the dramatic development is created.
Hiro’s elder brother, Tadashi Hamada, becomes after his death – like Obi-Wan Kenobi in another universe – a symbol of mentorship and motivation, and transcends therefore the limits of brotherhood as a competitive relationship and undertaking throughout modernity: Tadashi Hamada is a positive, well-balanced young man on the way into his own adulthood. After his death in the laboratory fire while trying to save his professor, the healthcare robot Baymax created by him takes over his task of guiding the teenager Hiro on the complicated alleys of puberty. In his turn, Hiro, the younger brother and the main human character, learns to overcome the pain of the loss of his brother in the pursuit of a meaningful life; in doing so, he transcends anger and the will to revenge into compassion and the ability to forgive – more often than not practical instruments in dealing with the intricacies and inconsistencies of the grown-ups’ world.
In a discussion with a Western animation fan, six reasons for Baymax being an unusual animated work on men and masculinity produced in the West came out: firstly, it is a coming-of-age movie which realistically and emotionally depicts the fears and confusions of late-modern teenagers, notably male ones. Secondly, it clearly moves away from the classic plot of giving in into one’s negative emotions, and pursues a policy of overcoming sadness, loss and the wish to revenge. Thirdly, it is far more than an adaptation of an original comics book, and while it honestly pays tribute to its aesthetic-ideological source, it surpasses its model and develops an own universe, with a clear message and profile. A fourth dimension is its infusion with Japanese elements which leads, on a fifth level, to a rarely encountered diversity of images and ideas presented in a Disney or Hollywood production. Finally, it is a futuristic work, re-creating avant-la-lettre the world of tomorrow, not as a dystopian space dominated by violence and hatred, but as a beautiful planet, fresh and attractive in its colorful plurality.
In his quest for love, acceptance and belonging, Hiro Hamada uncovers a whole new universe of significance and engagement, in which friendship and individual freedom constitute the foundation of an innovative attitude towards self and others. Traditionally transmitted competition and repression turn into creative interdependence, peaceful co-existence and constructive cooperation – which is, after all, the essence of being a man in today’s world, shaping a prosperous future of peace and abundance for all.
[1] Loosely based on the science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner was focused on the disturbingly hypocritical representaton of robots by humans and their co-existence, on the background of a dystopian future set in 2019-Los Angeles. The 2017-released sequel Blade Runner 2049 (director: Denis Villeneuve) is a reformulation of the century-old adage that being a human is the most beautiful thing in the whole universe.
