There's been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk about the changing face of San Francisco. But in an upcoming Disney flick, San Francisco's face changes more drastically than any of us are currently imagining, into a Blade Runner meets Star Trek meets Epcot vision called "San Fransokyo."
As Gizmodo reports, Big Hero 6 is based on a Tokyo-set Marvel comic book, but the animated film's directors opted to merge the classic setting with San Francisco, resulting in what they say is "an exact representation" of the city, just with Japanese details.
The animators used detailed property data from the city's Assessor-Recorder's office—available thanks to the city's progressive open data program—to get detailed information about the city's 83,000 buildings and the nearly exact number and location of elements like streetlights and street trees. "We don't claim you can find your house" says Big Hero 6's technical supervisor Hank Driskill. "But if you go to where your house is, you'll find the right building of the right size."
You can get a little more of an idea of what they were going for in this clip of some "Cable Car" footage below:
According to Disney, the film, which seems like a perfectly pleasant thing to take a kid to, will open on November 7.
