Have you seen Big Hero 6 yet? It has just won an Oscar you know, for Animated Feature Film, so if you haven’t, it’s time! It’s now out on DVD and Blu-ray with some real cool bonus features.
The movie is an action-packed comedy-adventure about robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, who learns to harness his genius—thanks to his brilliant brother Tadashi and their like-minded friends: adrenaline junkie Go Go Tamago, neatnik Wasabi, chemistry whiz Honey Lemon and fanboy Fred. When a devastating turn of events catapults them into the midst of a dangerous plot unfolding in the streets of San Fransokyo, Hiro turns to his closest companion—a robot named Baymax—and transforms the group into a band of high-tech heroes determined to solve the mystery.
I have shared with you my interview posts with Ryan Potter and Daniel Henney and Directors Don Hall and Chris Williams. Now I get to share with you the actor that voices Baymax, Scott Adsit. He shares how he found Baymax’s voice and how it wasn’t always easy to break character.
Scott Adsit as the Voice of Baymax
Was it a challenge for you to bring the character Baymax to life?
Yeah, I think the audience does a lot of the work for Baymax, because he does skirt along in a kind of impartiality emotionally, but, I get to lean on either side of him just a little bit, to invite the emotions to flood in from the audience. So it’s a lot of infernal on the audience’s part, and projection. It was a bit of a challenge not to go too far off that line, but still communicate something emotionally, because he really is, we decided pretty, pretty early on that he does not have that kind of emotional life. It is all programming, but it spite of that decision on our part, the emotion, his emotional life does kind of creep in here and there.
It must have been a challenge to find Baymax’s voice, how did you find it?
Yeah, I didn’t know if it would be like a robotic voice. They brought me in for the audition and the script was the first indication that it wouldn’t be a typical robotic voice. Then when I saw the picture, because they already had the character design, and so when I saw the picture, I just saw soft, huggable, so I found a very benign bedside manner voice. I mixed that with kind of like a, the state of the art of robotic interaction vocally, which is pretty much, automated phone system. So he will talk with the flow, but then there are elements within a sentence that are variables. They’ll sound a little separate from the rest of it.
Going through the process, what did you look to for inspiration?
I more looked at like family members who are very soft and huggable and benign. I didn’t research other robots. First of all, I know all the other robots, and if I going to research it, it would be to stay away from 3PO or from K9 or whoever.
Do you feel that your character evolved throughout the film?
We found the voice pretty early on in the audition, I think. The big change was somewhere in the middle of the process, they decided to give him another, facet, which is when he loses power and becomes, for lack of a better word, drunk. So I came in and they introduced this concept to me, and they’d scripted a bit of it. So my first question was okay, so how do I take that voice and make it drunk, because it is such a straight line, the voice. I said so do you want it to sound like, like a robot who’s drunk? And they said no, just be drunk. So, then they put a process, a little filter on that, which, Baymax has and that was it. I just played over the top drunk and when you’re looking at the character and when they got the filter….I guess your mind processes oh, that’s how a robot gets drunk. It’s just how I pretend to be.
An interesting thing about the processing filter on Baymax, I was told this after the fact, John Lassiter, who is the man in charge of the studio, wanted there to be a processing on my voice, but he also wanted it to be, my voice to come through. So they would bring him examples of a filter that they wanted to use in the sound department, and he would say no, dial it back a bit, dial it back a little bit. They kept dialing it back, dialing it back, until eventually,it was just my voice, no filter. They said oh there’s nothing on this now. John liked what I was doing naturally. What they ended up doing was a combination. They have all that filter on me at the beginning when you meet Baymax, and then during the course of the film, they dial it back, dial it back, dial it back, so that by the end, and I don’t know if you’ve all seen the movie, but in the last scene in the void there is no filter on my voice at. It’s just me. He kind of finds his humanity with a subtle kind of a subtextual thing that subliminal, that you guys may not notice. I didn’t.
Did you find yourself going home and staying in character?
Yeah, I would go home and I would catch myself talking with the voice, which is not much different from my voice, but I know when I got it on. I would have to catch myself saying don’t, don’t start talking like him all the time because then that would really annoy people, especially casting directors.
Prior to traveling for the interview, I got to send in a couple of questions for Baymax to answer. Check out this fun video of his answers to my questions.
Ha! Love it! Make sure you get your Big Hero 6 Collector’s Edition today!
BIG HERO 6 (On Blu-ray and Disney HD 2/24/15)
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*I was part of a press conference to cover the release of Big Hero 6 on Blu-ray and DVD and all expenses were covered by Disney. All opinions are my own.
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