For our Class of ’99, it would be remiss to go without at least one animated piece—and it’s one that, while not a success in its day, still remains a cult classic for some very good reasons. It’s also one that represents that last peak for 2D animation in the west—and what a peak it was. Here’s my take on The Iron Giant.
Through the nineties, Disney had bounced back after a couple of anemic decades, with hit after hit that unfortunately 25-30 years later it feels compelled to recycle as decidedly less visually appealing CGI remakes. But despite that, you certainly can’t deny the impact and artistic boundary pushing its Renaissance represented—some, like Hunchback of Notre Dame, actually arguably hold up now better than ever. Some, like Pocahontas, less so, even if they still look pretty. And hey, I’m one of those that actually quite likes Hercules!
Ideally, one company raising the bar should spur others to do the same. And some tried—Fox animation did so by just rather cynically copying the Disney formula with Anastasia. Dreamworks however did so but at the same time pushing the limits even further with scope and intensity with Prince of Egypt, a film that arguably rivals or even tops most of Disney’s output in this decade just by itself. And Warner Brothers also threw in their hat here, getting Brad Bird to adapt a relatively unknown storybook about a robot from space.
Conceived as yet another musical piece, Bird in his directorial debut here reframed it as a story harking back to the scifi of the 1950s—while also reframing it as a story of a boy caught between a new friend and Cold War tension of the time. Straight off the bat, the animation’s great—it’s got it’s own style that combines the more angular look common in the 90s with Norman Rockwell and comic book styles of the 50s, making it distinctive enough. CG animation was of course combined, but for the most part seamlessly, and to rather intense effect near the end when we start combining death rays with imploding tanks.
But before that? Our story is a simple but effective one enough—our protagonist is young Hogarth, living with his single mother in small town Maine (there’s some nice background dressing heavily implying that his dad was a casualty in the Korean War, the sort of attention to detail I like). One night, while watching cheesy brain monster movies on TV, he investigates a crash in the wood to make friends with an arriving alien robot voiced minimally but memorably by none other than Vin Diesel.
Our secondary cast is all on point—we have Christopher McDonald as a snooping government agent who goes rather too far in his effort to heighten his career, and Harry Connick Jr as a beatnik scrapyard owner who ends up rolling with the whole thing. Compared to both the original story and a lot of other animated fare at the time, though, what seems to be a cute story of a boy and his robot is played with just that right level of seriousness—our characters do question who actually built him and why, and that leads into what was then a rather scary climax for a kid’s movie where we more or less find out why. It's one of those things that's actually willing along the way to deal with some heavy topics even between all the scifi action, without talking down to the audience, young or old.
And, at the end, beyond atomic threats and robots clashing with battleships, we have a nice message about your origin not dictating who you should be—something seemingly easily forgotten. Between solid enough writing and animation, that’s why Iron Giant is looked on fondly by most, even if it flopped at the box office back in ’99.
Indeed, not long after, Disney’s own more action-orientated efforts with Atlantis and Treasure Planet, not dissimilar in tone to this one, also floundered—and so did Titan AE. Between this string of flops, the CG revolution began in earnest with Shrek, dictating most animated output in the west since then. Of course, like anything, that comes with good and bad—but with this film, when they say they don’t make ‘em like this anymore, it’s not wrong. Aside from maybe the Spider-Verse movies, they really don’t. As far as lavish 2D animation goes, it’s good enough that at least we can look back on their peak, and appreciate them for when they do hold up…
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