Unruly Animations: Disney's Big Hero 6 and the Future Geographies of the University

• In Event: Pedagogies of (Resistance to) Neoliberalism

Abstract

Disney’s 2014 animated film Big Hero 6 offers a captivating glimpse of the contemporary university through its representation of the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology (SFIT), with its shiny modern architecture, expansive research laboratories and multiethnic, high-performing student population. The movie’s narrative arc follows Hiro Hamada, a Japanese American boy and robotics prodigy, who begins as a juvenile delinquent, participating in back-alley “bot” fights. Hiro’s encounter with the diverse students from SFIT as well as Baymax, a robotic healthcare companion, however, awakens him to his own potential. Over the course of the film, he not only becomes a member of a crime-fighting superhero team, but also comes to the realization that the university is the ideal site for the cultivation of the individual, for the discovery of “proper” uses of knowledge and technology. In this sense, Big Hero 6 can be read as a film that sustains neoliberal fantasies, transporting audiences to an ideal futuristic landscape, where the university emerges as a site of racial harmony that reinvents the myth of the model minority while relegating concerns about student debt and social and material inequality to the illicit alleyway.

By thinking through Stuart Hall’s admonition of the “double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance,” this presentation aims to elaborate strategies for negotiating the dominant, largely compromised visions of the university in Big Hero 6 alongside the possibilities of reading and teaching dissent. I explore how engaging this film on multiple scales, from the level of animation and technology to characterization, plot, and reception, opens up multiple avenues for approaching it as dissident viewers. In particular, I ask, what happens when we work toward animating those subjectivities, histories, and geographies that are rendered invisible by Disney’s appealing landscape and loveable characters? I consider, for example, how the university opens up into the world of San Fransokyo, a magical blend of the urban spaces of San Francisco and Tokyo that required advanced digital mapping technologies for its construction. Recognizing how this landscape celebrates the technological and cultural exchange between Japan and the U.S., I argue, creates openings for attending to the imaginaries foreclosed by the film’s geography, namely, how it precludes attention to the politically charged spaces of China and the Middle East. Moving from broader geographies, I also examine the film for minor moments of unruly animation, where a robot’s seemingly sentient act of rebellion against its creator enables a dialogue about affective labor and racialization.

Through this multiscalar engagement with Big Hero 6, my presentation seeks to open up a conversation about how we might work with both the constraints and possibilities of popular culture; that is, how we need to recognize the appropriation of the minor and minority discourses in shoring up principles of “excellence,” “individualism” and “diversity” characteristic of the neoliberal university, while simultaneously enacting dissent through our pedagogies and practices to instantiate other possible universities and universes.

Author

• Frances H Tran, Graduate Center of the City University of New York