100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #33: The Iron Giant (1999)
Directed by Brad Bird.
If there is a particular subset of cinema that I am passionate about it is animation. Obviously like most children of my generation I grew up on many of the Disney classics on VHS, but I was also fascinated by the process: watching the extensive behind-the-scenes features of Finding Nemo on the DVD when I was around 10 is what I consider my “gateway” into becoming a cinephile. From that point on it was my life goal to work at Pixar, and I hastily made it my mission to learn everything I could about Pixar, and it was through that research that I ended up picking up other books on film from my local library and…the rest is history.
Animation is cinema at its most free and limitless, and yet it is notoriously the most difficult kind to make. Before George Lucas revolutionized the industry with the technical wizardry of Industrial Light & Magic, if you wanted to create a movie that pushed the bounds of reality and imagination you turned to animation: to try to make something of the same fantastic caliber in live-action usually resulted in your film being labeled a “B-movie” at worst. Animation, in the golden days of being drawn by hand, was cinema in its most pure form: every frame was lovingly crafted and stitched together to create a product that could match whatever crazy idea or image that came up in the head of the animator. Many of our great contemporary directors, including Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, and Gore Verbinski, have turned to animation to best express their aesthetic sensibilities, and consequently has resulted in some of their best work. You might even say that the highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar, is an animated film.
And yet animation in recent years has been relegated to that ugly word of “genre”: just another category for Netflix or some other streaming service to divide its “content” into. Walt Disney Animation, the literal birthplace of modern animation, has fallen into sullen disarray, catering more and more to the TikTok generation than to anyone who just wants to see a good movie. The ones to suffer the most from this dearth of quality entertainment are children, who instead are being fed a constant diet of schlock, superheroes, and Five Nights at Freddy’s. There is nothing to feed the imagination in a way that reflects the true, good, or the beautiful. If there is anything good about streaming, however, it’s that parents at least have access to a treasure trove of past classics to show their kids rather than tempting fate with the latest Minions film to turn your brain off to.
The Iron Giant stands tall amongst the classics from its era and for some represents a “final bow” of sorts for traditional animation. For my generation it’s a film that at the very least exists at some point in everyone’s subconscious: you either watched it at home, a friend’s house, or in school on VHS, even if the memory has long since faded. The titular giant (designed by legendary Star Wars designer Joe Johnston) is instantly recognizable to folks even vaguely tuned into popular culture and since the film’s release it has had a revered place in the pantheon of animated classics.
The film was conceptualized by animator Brad Bird, who studied under the famous “Nine Old Men” at Disney along with Pixar co-founder John Lasseter at the CalArts program, one of the last initiatives Walt founded before his death. After working for a few years helping shows like The Simpsons and King of the Hill off the ground he decided to take advantage of the “Renaissance” that was going on in animation during the 1990s, and met with Warner Bros. after the company he had signed a production deal with merged with the studio. They offered a film they had been developing based on the children’s book “The Iron Man” by Ted Hughes: Bird immediately connected with the story, which was written by the author to comfort his children after the death of their mother. Bird had lost a sister to gun violence, and decided to significantly shift the story to answer the question: “what if a gun had a soul?”1 The story was now about young Hogarth Hughes, a boy living during the Cold War who discovers and befriends a giant alien robot.
Burned from the studios’ previous animated venture Quest for Camelot, Warner Bros gave the film a third of the budget a Disney production would normally have and half the time to do it, but in exchange Bird and his team was given a tremendous amount of creative freedom on the project. The freedom is apparent in so many different aspects of the film: there are no Disney-esque musical numbers or cute animal sidekicks, and the film is unafraid to ask some deep questions and go to some dark places. The voice acting is absolutely superb on the part of Eli Marienthal (Hogarth Hughes), Jennifer Aniston (Mrs. Hughes), Harry Connick Jr. (Dean, a beatnik outsider who Hogarth befriends), and Christopher McDonald (Kent Mansley, a paranoid federal agent who is intent on discovering the mysterious Giant), lending the film an authentic feel as directed by Bird. The real star in this however is Vin Diesel as the gentle “Iron Giant,” giving a soulful and memorable performance that certainly outmatches anything he has done since.
The story is relatively straightforward and yet the screenplay co-written by Bird and Tim McCanlies is incredibly smart; the dialogue feels more akin to an Aaron Sorkin movie than any of its contemporary Disney competition. The heart of the film is the relationship between Hogarth and the Giant; similar to E.T. the Giant goes from being a creature that Hogarth must protect and take care of to a father figure who must in turn protect and take care of Hogarth. The film also does not shy away from going in-depth on it’s subject material: true to Bird’s original intentions of answering the question “what if a gun had a soul?”, a poignant scene halfway through the film has Hogarth and the Giant encounter a deer deep in the woods. After they marvel at the relatively small creature and begin to head home, they freeze in their tracks at the incredibly loud sound of a gunshot. Upon returning to where they just were the Giant is aghast to see the deer lying dead on the forest floor, killed by hunters who immediately run away at the sight of the mechanical man. Hogarth tries to explain what death means to the Giant, but the robot is still disturbed and saddened.
Later that night, while resting in the junkyard that Hogarth’s friend Dean is letting him use to hide his robot companion from the rest of the world, the Giant asks Hogarth further questions on death, asking whether he or Hogarth will die eventually. The response the young boy gives is not the typical answer that one would expect from a Hollywood film: Hughes reasons that the Giant, because of the creature’s ability to speak, think, and have feelings, probably has a soul, and explains that if you have a soul you can never really die. The scene ends with the Giant, lying on his back in a pile of a scrap, gazing up at the multitude of stars, quietly muttering to himself: “Souls don’t die”.
The scene is one of the most powerful in the film, and is a great example of the ability of films to send important and poignant messages to both children and adults. The Iron Giant is not a “preachy” film by any standard, and yet its simple moral lessons stand in stark contrast to the ideas of “be/do whatever you want” that are presented to children in today’s age.
After this film, Bird went over to Pixar to make two of their best films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and is currently working on his passion project, Ray Gunn, with his old friend John Lasseter over at Netflix. Many still cite The Iron Giant as his best film, and in this humble writer’s opinion, it may very well be the greatest animated movie ever made. It’s a testament to a different age of entertainment and to a medium that many look back to with wistful fondness. Every frame of this movie was handcrafted with love and passion for the art form, and together with Michael Kamen’s gorgeous score it stands as one of the most beautiful films ever made.