The Iron Giant
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 It came from outer space!
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The Iron Giant is a 1999 American animated science fiction film using both traditional animation and computer animation, produced by Warner Bros. Feature Animation and directed by Brad Bird in his directorial debut. It is based on the 1968 novel The Iron Man by Ted Hughes (which was published in the United States as The Iron Giant) and was scripted by Tim McCanlies from a story treatment by Bird.
Plot
In this animated adaptation of Ted Hughes' Cold War fable, a giant alien robot (Vin Diesel) crash-lands near the small town of Rockwell, Maine, in 1957. Exploring the area, a local 9-year-old boy, Hogarth, discovers the robot, and soon forms an unlikely friendship with him. When a paranoid government agent, Kent Mansley, becomes determined to destroy the robot, Hogarth and beatnik Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.) must do what they can to save the misunderstood machine.
Why It Rocks
- This film launched the career of Brad Bird, the director of this film, would later make even more great animated films like Ratatouille, The Incredibles franchise, helping shape up Brad Bird's love for animation, a love started by working on The Simpsons, and defining animation as more than simple kid's content.
- Beautiful animation that mixes traditional animation with computer animation in a similar manner to films like Treasure Planet, Titan A.E. and Help! I'm A Fish.
- One of the film's strongest scenes is where the Giant is forced to stop the missile or everyone in town is mercilessly killed, reciting what Hogarth told him during their first meeting before sacrificing himself to stop said missile.
- The Iron Giant, accompanied by the mechanical voice of Vin Diesel, is a lovable and deep character. Being a weapon capable of casuing great harm and destruction, the entire plot of the film is him learning to control that nature by Hogarth. His entire character is perfectly summed up by a line from Brad Bird used to pitch the film: "What if a gun had a soul and didn't want to be a gun?".
- It balances two plots well together: Hogarth finding and being friendly with The Iron Giant, and the government trying to get rid of it.
- Great voice acting, especially from Eli Marienthal (as Hogarth Hughes), Vin Diesel (the Iron Giant), Harry Connick Jr. (as Dean McCoppin), Jennifer Aniston (as Annie Hughes), and James Gammon (Foreman Marv Loach), who were mostly new to voice acting as still managed to give amazing performances.
- A very triumphant soundtrack. The score for the film absolutely slaps with tracks The Giant Discovered, The Eye Of The Storm, Trance-Former, No Following, The Last Giant Piece, and more. It also has a large amount of great songs that perfectly set and fit the mood for each scene that they're present in, including Honeycomb (by Bob Merrill), I Got a Rocket in My Pocket (written by Jimmy Logsdon and Vic McAlpin and performed by Jimmy Lloyd), Comin' Home Baby (written by Bob Dorough and Ben Tucker and performed by Mel Tormé), Duck and Cover (by Teddy Newton), Capitolizing (written by Babs Gonzales and performed by Babs Gonzales), and Searchin' (written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and performed by The Coasters) among many others.
- Lots of depth and humanity, especially for a Warner Bros. animated film meant for kids. For example, they are very few outright villains in the film. As a good majority of the cast consists of character that parallel real people in modern society. And the story itself deals with internal conflict as a major theme due to the Iron Giant's capability to wipe out entire countries as a living weapon and being taught about love, empathy, and the beauty of existence among other things by Hogarth.
- A lot of memorable lines that spurred from the film's immensely clever and cheesy writing, which anyone can recite today, "Where's the giant, Mansley?"
- The U.S. Army as seen in the film is accurately depicted in its mid-late 1950s form, including the choice of vehicles, weapons, and the appearance of a soldier; the latter impressively down to the cut and style of uniform.
Bad Qualities
- For a movie with a lot of ideas, it's countered by a short run time of 87 minutes (which was somewhat fixed by the extended edition that featured 2 scenes story-boarded during original production but not animated until sixteen years later in 2015, the same year it received a theatrical re-release).
- As mentioned above, some of the dialogue is very cheesy.
- Kent Mansley, the government agent who's the main force behind the Iron Giant's tracking, can be an annoying villain at times.
- Due to the poor performance from their previous animated film Quest for Camelot, Warner Bros. decided to care less about marketing the film properly and focused more on marketing Wild Wild West, thus letting The Iron Giant bomb at the box office.
Trivia
- General Rogard's actor, John Mahoney, passed away in 2018, 19 years after the film was released.
- Sadly, Ted Hughes (author of the original novel the film was based on) passed away a year before the movie was released. He did, however, live long enough to read the script. Despite its departure from the source material, Hughes was impressed. He expressed his approval in a letter to the studio: "I want to tell you how much I like what Brad Bird has done … He’s made a terrific dramatic situation out of the way he’s developed The Iron Giant. I can’t stop thinking about it."
- Hughes wrote the novel as a way of comforting his children after the suicide of their mother, poet Sylvia Plath.
- Hogarth, who didn't have a last name in the novel, was given the surname "Hughes" after his author.
- Animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of Disney's legendary "Nine Old Men", made cameos as train engineers. Brad Bird has cited both animators as an influence on his career.
- The original novel this film was based on was called The Iron Man in the United Kingdom, however in the UK, this film is still called The Iron Giant over there.
Reception
The Iron Giant was critically acclaimed, and was praised for its story, animation, characters, the portrayal of the title character and the voice performances of Aniston, Connick Jr., Diesel, Mahoney, Marienthal and McDonald. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 96% approval rating based on 143 reviews, with an average rating of 8.21/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The endearing Iron Giant tackles ambitious topics and complex human relationships with a steady hand and beautifully animated direction from Brad Bird.". Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100 based on 29 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. The Reel Source forecasting service calculated that "96–97%" of audiences that attended recommended the film. Despite the acclaim, the film significantly underperformed at the box office, grossing $31.3 million worldwide against a production budget of $50 million, which was blamed on Warner Bros.' unusually poor marketing campaign and skepticism towards animated film production following the mixed critical reception and box office failure of Quest for Camelot in the preceding year.
The Iron Giant found new life on home video, with WB spending $35 million on marketing. It also built a strong cult following after repeated showings on Cartoon Network throughout the 2000s, where during that time the film was continuously shown on the network for 24 hours straight on special public holidays such as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. In 2015, an extended, remastered version of the film was re-released theatrically, and on home video the following year.
