The recent history of Disney's Big Hero 6 cartoon

Digital Trends wrote about Disney's animated production, Big Hero 6, from the past decade, probably one of the last cartoons they produced worth seeing to date:

The superhero genre has become remarkably overcrowded over the last 15 years. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Christopher Nolan-led redefining of the genre in the late 2000s and early 2010s paved the way for an era of Hollywood dominated by movie characters in capes and villains with world-ending plans. Whether that era is still going is up for debate, but it led to a few years there — roughly 2014-2023 — where superhero movies and TV shows genuinely felt like they were everywhere, and sometimes to a suffocating degree. That doesn’t mean, however, that certain superhero films haven’t fallen through the cracks here and there over the past 10 years.

That seems, at least, to be the fate that has befallen Big Hero 6. Loosely inspired by the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name, the animated Disney film received largely positive reactions from both critics and casual viewers alike when it hit theaters in 2014 and it grossed over $650 million at the worldwide box office. On top of all of that, it went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2015. Big Hero 6 nonetheless ranks as the most underrated superhero film of the modern era — a vibrant piece of comic-book-inspired storytelling that is oft-forgotten by fans of its genre and which strangely hasn’t received the big-screen sequel it deserves.

This'd have to be saying something, considering how far the mighty at Disney have fallen in the decade since, and the comics adaptations have too. Maybe the reason it won't see a sequel is because it wasn't PC enough in its time, and ever since, the PC situation's gotten much worse. Or, if a sequel were made, it'd be forced to incorporate wokeness, and that would only make a long-awaited sequel into a huge disappointment that didn't have to be.

Maybe that's why it's worth considering there's some movies that are good enough to stand on their own without resorting to only so many sequels. Even family fare doesn't have to see a whole lot of them, because if the sequels turns out to be bad, it can diminish what the 1st film accomplished, and that's why animators have to realize it can always pay to just produce one entry, without trying to build up whole franchises that ultimately could lose their edge. Let's home someday, the animation industry and even the whole entertainment industry in general will understand that.