I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this is not going to be about the usual vapid celebrities who have ruled over the pages of tabloids, newspapers and magazines throughout this sad year. There are indeed other style icons on the rise who may not look the part, but who will definitely prove more inspiring.
If you're based in one of the countries where Disney's new film Big Hero 6 was already released, you have probably identified one cute and reassuring hero, the Michelin Man-looking Baymax. In which ways is he a style icon? Well, let's go behind Disney and Marvel's first animated film to discover it.
The story revolves around a talented boy, Hiro Hamada, with a passion for building robots. After his brother Tadashi, the creator of soft and cuddly robot nurse Baymax, dies in a suspicious accident, Hiro has to deal with bereavement, while trying to discover who's the mysterious villain in a kabuki mask who has stolen his Microbots.
Set in the fictitious San Fransokyo, a clever mix of San Francisco and Tokyo with a sky cluttered with airborne turbines harvesting energy from wind and skyscrapers that mix with traditional temples (and a Tokyo inspired Golden Gate Bridge...), though with a predictable ending, the film is not your usual princess fairy tale and the technology behind it is actually researched from real projects.
Tadashi is a student at the local San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, a cool research lab where the craziest ideas are launched and tested by a group of geeks who will turn into unlikely superheroes thanks to science and technology.
Hiro is well versed in building robots and uses the force of magnetism (a revelation in these last few years also in the design field if we think about Iris Van Herpen's "Magnetic Motion" collection designed with the help of artist Jolan Van der Wiel; bizarrely enough, the way the villain Yokai magnetically builds his fluid columns of Microbots on which he rapidly moves as if they were extensions of his legs, calls to mind the scenes in Besson's Lucy with the main character fluidly morphing and melting into a computer) as the principle behind his Microbots.
Hiro also uses 3D scanners and 3D printing techniques and there seems to be a random Raspberry Pi sitting on his desk, he could therefore be considered as a maker.
Hiro's team includes Wasabi, who experiments with laser; Honey Lemon, a chemistry genius in a kawaii suit and a purse shooting chemical balls and Go Go Tomago who uses magnetic levitation in her projects and suit.
The plot moves from Steven Seagle and Duncan Rouleau's comic Alpha Fight, a story of human/robot relationships, revised in 2008 by Chris Claremont who added the character of Fred /Fredzilla.
Despite some critics claimed the technology in the film is not borrowed from reality, Hiro's Microbots are reinventions of the Kilobots being researched at Harvard University; Baymax is modelled on inflatable robots researched at Carnegie Mellon University (ready more about it here; filmmakers also toured robotics labs at MIT looking for projects that may become available to consumers in five to ten years) and the girls in the Big Hero team are inspired by an all-girl robotics team from Pittisburgh, the Girls on Steel.
Besides, the level of accuracy directors Don Hall and Chris Williams opted for is also incredibly impressive and based on real data: blending Eastern and Western culture San Fransokyo is an animated futuristic metropolis that actually relies on property data from the San Francisco's Assessor-Recorder's office.
And so Baymax the children's hero has the potential of becoming a style icon for what it represents - the future and useful technology that can genuinely improve people's lives.
The interesting point about this story is that, if Disney opts for technology and science rather than magic and ice shooting princesses, this could genuinely be the year science and technology triumph over superficiality, the year of geeks, makers and scientists over princesses and vapid stars.
The final confirmation? The moving biopic directed by James Marsh about theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking based on the memoirs of his first wife Jane Wilde, The Theory of Everything, will also get its European release next year.
Let's hope that the technology, science and clever humanity behind these films will be the heroes of 2015 and that they will prompt us to study and understand how things work and how technology can improve our lives rather than passively accepting it as a luxurious item to idolise and employ as a status symbol.
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