Every so often a movie appears that flops at the box office which by all accounts should have been a license to print money. The Iron Giant is such a movie. Like the last such movie, The Prince of Egypt, it is animated. I suspect that the reason for this is the negative impression left by such non-Disney animated features as The King and I or The Quest for Camelot or Anastasia. Audiences, having been burned by substandard product by other hands, must assume that animated films by anyone other than Disney MUST be crummy knock-offs. Since Warner Brothers feature animation has been one of the principal culprits in this, it is understandable, I think, that the public would skip The Iron Giant. This is really a crying shame, because Disney's animated movies are currently being victimized by a formula that has them in a deathgrip. The animated films that originate outside of Disney, even if they are released AS Disney, are a LOT more interesting than the traditional animated features that Disney inflicts on audiences every year. The Toy Story movies and A Bug's Life, both conceived and executed by Pixar rather than the Disney animation studio, are a testament to this, as are The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach (both the brainchildren of Tim Burton and Henry Selick). I am sure that the upcoming films from Nick Park's Aardman Animation studio will be much the same. The Iron Giant, while closer in actual form to the Disney product than the films I just listed, has the same kind of renegade vitality.
The Iron Giant has a curious pedigree.
My first exposure to The Iron Man was Pete Townsend's 1989 album of the same name, in which The Iron Man's voice was performed by the great John Lee Hooker. The album itself was a strange thing that didn't quite work the way it was supposed to despite the big name voices Townsend brought to the project. I understand that he eventually turned it into a stage play. Townsend is one of the producers of this project, but none of the songs from his previous versions have made the jump to the animated movie. This is something of a blessing. The lack of songs enables the movie to divorce itself from the Disney tradition and stand on its own merits. It's own merits are considerable. The original book, The Iron Man, was written by Ted Hughes (for a time, England's poet laureate) as a means of explaining the death of his wife to his children. His wife was poet Sylvia Plath, so her death obviously needed some explaining. The result was a children's story that was concerned with some pretty weighty issues. The movie version adds to this instead of simplifying things--also a key difference between The Iron Giant and any given Disney movie. I suspect that Hughes would have been enormously pleased with the movie (he was reportedly very pleased with Brad Bird's screen story prior to his death).
The film takes place in 1957 in the seacoast town of Rockwell, Maine--a name that suggests, simultaneously, both Norman Rockwell's idyllic view of America and Roswell, New Mexico, the town at the heart of many UFO conspiracy theories. The Iron Giant comes screaming from the sky and lands in the ocean late one stormy night. It wades ashore and begins looking for food--it eats metal. Enter young Hogarth Hughes, a kid who is looking for a pet that his mom will let him keep. He is watching television late one night (a wicked parody of The Fiend Without a Face or The Brain from Planet Arous, by the way) when the Iron Giant comes and eats his tv antenna. He goes to investigate and sees the Iron Giant attempting to eat a power relay and becoming entangled in the electrical lines. Seeing that the giant is in trouble, Hogarth shuts of the power. Shades of Androcles and the Lion. The giant befriends Hogarth, who must now keep the giant secret from adults and from the weasly G-man, Kent Mansley. In the interim, the giant learns from Hogarth what it is to be a kid: reading comic books, doing cannonballs in the lake, and lazing in the woods on an autumn afternoon. He also learns about death, when they stumble upon a deer that has been shot by some hunters. During this long middle section, Hogarth speculates on why the giant must have a soul and how death is part of life. Eventually, the secret gets out. The army arrives on the scene. When Hogarth is injured during the brouhaha, the giant reveals his arsenal of weaponry. After a destructive rampage, the injured Hogarth intercedes and convinces the giant that he "doesn't have to be a gun" and that "he is who he chooses to be." But it is too late: the Atom Bomb has been launched at the giant from an offshore submarine. The giant makes his choice. His final words are profoundly moving as he rises to meet his destiny.
Despite the weight of the issues the movie addresses, The Iron Giant is never less than a pure pleasure to watch. It eschews the complicated animation of recent Disney movies in favor of animation that doesn't announce itself as such. It is the first animated feature to successfully combine CGI animation with traditional cel animation. The giant itself, a retro creation almost completely created by a computer, has the warmth of line of a hand drawn character, and the personality to match. More importantly, the movie has a sly sense of humor throughout, particularly about the Americana of the time: the "duck and cover" how-to-survive an atomic holocaust educational films, the beatnik artist, the comic books and movies of the day. The last act of the movie is as action-packed as any science fiction epic. The end result is a movie that is timeless, a film that seems to me to be assured of an audience for generations to come. It is the first really satisfying animated movie in what seems like decades, a film that makes it clear that Disney has been asleep at the wheel for years, because even without the songs and the "deep canvas" animation and the Disney marketing machine behind it, The Iron Giant demonstrates the bounds of the possible, the power of the imagination, and the dignity of the human spirit.