This week Disney released the first teaser trailer for its
new feature film coming out later this year. Big Hero 6 marks the first collaboration between Walt Disney
Animation Studios and Marvel. Big Hero 6 is
the story between a boy and his huggable and squishy robot, which he wants to
transform into an action-packed hero.
This teaser trailer followed the same pattern as the Frozen teaser trailer last year. Instead
of trying to summarize the plot these trailers both took a decidedly character
centric approach. In both trailers they took two main characters and put them
in slapstick comedy scenarios in order to endear them to the audience. This
unique approach has caused a lot of people to talk about them, generating the
buzz that a trailer should.
In the Frozen
trailer above, Olaf and Sven were introduced to the audience in a clip of them
fighting over Olaf’s carrot nose. It introduced us to characters that were not
in the original story or synopsis, and peaked audiences interests through their
unique personalities and movements. Although Big Hero 6 is based off of a comic, and the characters are already
established, Disney modified the characters from the not very well-known comic
books. Since the average audience has not been exposed to these characters, the
followed the path of Olaf and Sven and introduced them in the same way. In the Big Hero 6 trailer however, there is
more of an element of the film’s plot included since it shows Hiro making his
soft robot into a mechanized warrior. But all the overall focus was still on
the characters.
So will other future films follow suit? This method
certainly seems to be working for Disney, as the response to the Frozen teaser
trailer was overall more positive than the response to the second trailer. The
response to the Big Hero 6 teaser has
been mixed so far, but people are talking about it in a mostly positive light.
Time will tell if this trend will catch on or not, but in my personal opinion I
like the character based approach much better to the traditional trailers.
