Baymax is my Homeboy
Just the other night I watched Big Hero Six with my daughter. She tends to be fairly particular about which films she enjoys and which ones merit just leaving the room in disgust. I’ve yet to find a consistent pattern, so everything we watch is kind of a gamble.
It was cold outside and miserable. We grabbed some blankets and made grilled cheese and soup and threw in the movie.
I should preface this by saying that I had pretty high hopes for this show. Set in a mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo dubbed San Fransokyo, based on a Japanese comic and an Academy Award for best animated feature? Sold.
It opened to a robot fight and that was all Hazel needed. She LOVED this. I won’t bother doing a synopsis or anything, but if you are looking for something fantastic to watch this evening I can’t recommend this highly enough. Even if you don’t have children.
Perhaps my favorite piece of the film was it’s focus on science-positive/female-positive leads. It made education a powerful tool, and the women in the group were empowered, intelligent and cool. That’s a hard thing to find of late. And it becomes more glaringly obvious as my little girl continues to get older.
I want her to have super cool role models from films and games and comics and all types of entertainment. I don’t want her to feel like being a girl is the feature; I want her talents and drive and passion to be the focus. It’s strange writing about this as a white guy. The world is completely tilted in my favor most of the time. These are things I didn’t even fully consider until I began to look for fun video games to share with my daughter when she gets older. I grew up on Prince of Persia, Sonic, Mario, Sunset Riders, and eventually more and more violent shooters. But most things I played were just dudes saving a girl. I wanted her to do the saving.
This is probably a good topic for another blog at another time.
We loved Big Hero Six. It was fun and colorful and Hazel digs robots. If you happen to find more movies or games or comics I can share with her, that treat women more respectfully than most, I’m looking. Those nerdy bits of entertainment are what make up a large portion of my personality, and sharing that with my daughter feels important. So uh, thanks Marvel, for not screwing that up.
tl;dr: Grilled cheese, cold nights and blanket forts are exactly what I hoped having a 2 year old would be like.
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