A 5 year old muses about fire breathing dragons in Big Hero 6

We love our movies.  Because we have younger children it’s rarer for them to get to the theaters and actually see good movies.  Granted, they’ll go to the movie theater maybe a dozen times a year, but rare is the instance where we enjoy the movie as much as they do.  Big Hero 6 is the best movie that fits that category that we’ve seen this year.  Here’s a video reaction from our somewhat camera shy son about Big Hero 6.

Immediately after leaving the theater our oldest was giddy, yelling things and punching the air.  When we turned the camera on it was a bit like that singing frog from the classic cartoon.  Hello my baby hello my darling, hello my ragtime gal…and then the frog stops and just does a normal frog thing.   It’s the singing frog syndrome I call it.

I had seen the previews and vaguely knew what to expect.  My wife hadn’t seen any of the previews and knew nothing about Big Hero 6.  Our children had seen the preview and knew that it involved a big, puffy, slow moving Hero and his teenage sidekick.

Our oldest enjoyed it lots, saying that Fred, the fire breathing dragon was his favorite character.  I enjoyed the movie from start to finish.  The plot is non-traditional for a PG rated movie, but that is one of the things that make it move so quickly and effortlessly.

One of the big plot points involves the death of a major character.  It’s a real death that impacts his family and is the heart and driving force behind the rest of the movie.  Having seen many sub-par movies where characters die, I expected them to come back at any moment and explain how they survived.  Thankfully, that didn’t happen, because if it did then Big Hero 6 might’ve been just another so-so PG family film.  Instead it’s a great film that is family friendly.

Most surprisingly it was our wife that enjoyed the film the most.  She roared with laughter during two scenes.  I mean eyes crying with laughter.  She’s since watch those scenes at home several times and still laughs very hard.  That is the benefit of her not seeing the trailer.

Our youngest who is 3 sat on mom’s lap for most of the film.  It was his first film and he stayed awake for the entire movie!  Big Hero 6 has a nice run time of 102 minutes.  It’s long enough to have real meat in the story, yet short enough to keep children entertained.

Big Hero 6 has lots of superheroes in the film and they were one thing that our oldest loved too.  Older kids will get the takeaway that it was teamwork and intelligence that saved the day.  There are also some great lessons about entrepreneurship, innovation and the struggle that it takes to work on and create something.