[7.7/10] Grief is one of the hardest emotions to process, especially when we lose someone in a way that feels senseless. *Big Hero 6* is funny, colorful, full of bright heroes and dazzling superpowers. But it’s also, at heart, an age-appropriate story about how we handle grief, and the best way to honor the people whose absence we feel so keenly.

The avatar for all of this is Hiro, a teenage boy who's bright enough to graduate from high school at thirteen but also impulsive and more focused on hitting it big than doing good in the world. That changes when he loses his big brother, Tadashi, who inspired him to put his brilliant mind to better use, and who died rushing into a burning building to save someone. All Hiro has left of his mentor/sibling is Baymax, an inflatable robot meant to provide first aid and other medical care to anyone he comes across.

It’s a weird setup if you think about it for too long, but that also works to *Big Hero 6*’s advantage. There’s an imaginative charm to the whole film: set in a cross between San Francisco and Tokyo, filled to the brim with impossible technologies like nanobots and matter transporters, and centering much of the emotional core of the movie on a big puffy white droid who seems more like an extra large carnival prize than a superhero sidekick.

And yet, Baymax is not just the heart of the film, he’s its funniest and most endearing feature. The animators find just the right movements for the big balloon animal, giving him a stilted, gentle walk that marks him as a creature of kindness and innocence. Voice actor Scott Adsit matches that in his vocal performance, giving Baymax a tone of both empathy and that particular robotic detachment. And his endless efforts to help Hiro recover from any sort of pain, be it a mild irritation from duct tape or the unfathomable loss of a sibling, make him the wholesome star of the show.

More to the point, he represents Tadashi, for Hiro and the audience. It’s not just that Baymax is the last project that Tadashi was working on. He fills the role that Tadashi once did, both in terms of trying to look after Hiro individually, but also in his general bent toward altruism, a manifestation of the big brother’s goal to help people operationalized in the form of a non-threatening bubble bot whose innate sweetness keeps that desire to help alive.

Baymax’s true purpose in the film is to help Hiro recover from his brother’s death. The show integrates that into a rousing superhero tale. Baymax recognizes that part of the treatment for loss is contact with friends, so he connects Hiro with Tadashi’s four labmates who are briefly, but distinctively introduced in the film’s first act.

In truth, the quartet of Go Go, Wasabi, Honey Lemon, and Fred don’t have much in the way of character, leaning more in the way of gimmicks and archetypes. But what they do have is personality, and a fun dynamic, with Hiro and one another. That rapport helps paper over some of the shortcuts the film takes in adding them to its narrative, and makes them memorable in the spaces where character writing meets performance, with a series of great line reads and fun gags.

That’s the other thing about *Big Hero 6* that makes it such a winning proposition: it’s a roundly cute and funny film. There’s few setups and punchlines, but there’s some fun physical humor with Baymax’s bubble bod in particular, a number of amusing lines parceled out among the titular superhero team, and some well-observed straight man shtick in Hiro trying to deal with the wide-eyed naiveness and matter-of-factness of his robo pal. The film remains sweet and lively throughout, with enough silly bits to keep you smiling and take the edge off the heavier material at its center.

It also manages to keep the tone light by unleashing any number of great visuals and set pieces. The look of San Fransokyo is a shining delight, with a nice mix of eastern and western architecture, mixed with futuristic tech, bright colors, and inviting settings. At the same time, the movie keeps the energy up with thrilling chases and escapes, showdowns with a particle-powered, kabuki mask-wearing, tentacle slashing baddie, and whole buildings being sucked into other, psychedelic realms. Within these kinetic sequences, the characters each boast unique designs with exaggerated but recognizable movements, and the contrast between the inherently buoyant robot and the particulate-molding villain create tons of opportunities for aesthetic excellence.

It turns out that villain is the negative image of Hiro. The one who stole Hiro’s microbots and is using them for evil is not, as the team suspected, the well-heeled businessman a la Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn. It is, instead, Professor Callaghan, the kindly instructor at Tadashi’s school who seemed to be a man of principle and science. Maybe he was once. We learn that his daughter perished (or appeared to), in one of that businessman’s futuristic demonstrations, and he’s been out for revenge ever since.

In *Big Hero 6*’s most harrowing scenes, Hiro almost goes down that path himself. He trains Baymax to do harm, not repair it. He removes the protocols Tadashi installed, wanting to avenge his brother and take out Callaghan, but at the cost of violating the ideals that Tadashi lived and died by. Eventually, in a tough moment, Hiro realizes all of this, understanding that it’s not what his brother would want, and that instead, caring and altruism are the best ways to honor his brother, not taking down his killer and inadvertently becoming just like him.

That is a simplified but no less profound lesson on how grief affects us. It makes us want to lash out, to get vengeance, but as Baymax himself indicates, that’s no way to find peace. Instead, Hiro self-actualizes by living up to his brother’s legacy and carrying it on, with his friends and his robot buddy, there to protect and save and use their big ol’ brains for good. It’s that commitment to helping people, to improving human life rather than taking it, that finally gets Hiro back to a good place.

The charming, exciting, endlessly sweet trappings of the film make it the perfect, unassuming delivery method for ideas so rooted in some of the toughest things we mortal beings have to grapple with. *Big Hero 6* traces Hiro’s journey from robo-fighting dilettante, to kid in mourning, to vengeance-seeking brute, to an enlightened hero worthy of upholding what his brother stood for, and does it beautifully. Life is pain, and anyone who tells you differently is still selling something. But that pain is much easier to deal with a friendly poofball robot at your side, and a loved one’s notions of love and kindness on your mind.