The Metal Menace from Mars

The Disney Renaissance was the period in the late 1980s and all through the 1990s when Disney’s animation studio went from struggling (through releases like The Great Mouse Detective and The Black Cauldron) to being a powerhouse of animation once more. Release after release found acclaim and massive success, from The Little Mermaid to Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and even Tarzan. And Disney’s success spurred on other studios to try and make their own massive, animated blockbusters.

Don Bluth had The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven and even a play in the Disney PrincessesReleased in 1937, Disney's Snow White was a gamble for the company: the first fully-animated, feature-length film ever created. It's success lead to the eventual creation of the Disney Princess franchise, which has spawned 13 main-line films and multiple spin-off movies and shows. zone with Anastasia. Fox attempted to break in with Ferngully. Dreamworks came for Disney’s lunch with Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado. And then there was Warner Bros., who also wanted to become an animated powerhouse and spent the time and effort to really pull together a big animation group. They invested big, dropping $40 Mil (which at the time was huge for an animated project) on Quest for Camelot… and it bombed. It bombed so hard (making only $38 Mil despite even more money being spent to advertise the film), that Warners decided to get out of the whole animation game altogether.

The only problem was that they still had a second animated film in production, a little film called The Iron Giant, with animator and first-time director, Brad Bird, attached. The studio had spent $50 Mil on this film, and suddenly they didn’t have any faith in animation at all. So they dropped the movie onto an unsuspecting audience, barely advertised it, and left it to fend for itself in the Summer of 1999. So, naturally, it bombed. No one knew what the film was about, and no one really cared that it existed, so it only managed to make $39 Mil during its time in theaters.

But, afterwards, that’s when people discovered it. What they found was a magical film (based very loosely on the 1968 Ted Hughes novel, The Iron Man) full of wonderful storytelling and fantastic animation. It’s a movie that builds and builds, blending everything together towards a powerful and heartfelt climax. It’s the kind of story that could have been told at Disney or Don Bluth Studios and it would have fit perfectly, and probably been a smash hit. But because it was developed by the WB, and they were clearly idiots when it came to animation, and languished and died and had to find its audience on home video.

Which, with the death of DVD, is the kind of film that would be lost and never find its audience now. Just something to think about.

Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) is a young boy living in Rockwell, ME, in the 1950s. He spends his days going to school (where they’re taught to “Duck and Cover” in case of the bomb) and his afternoons out in the woods, finding new animals he wants to keep as pets all while is doting mother, Annie (Jennifer Aniston), works at a diner and just hopes that Hogarth can stay out of trouble. He’s a precocious boy, though, so when something mysterious comes crashing down to Earth near his house, he grabs his pellet gun and goes to investigate.

And what he finds is a giant metal man. Although he first thinks the iron man to be a monster, he comes to find he’s a gentle giant (voiced by Vin Diesel) so wants nothing more than to learn and explore. The Giant suffered damage when he landed and doesn’t know why he’s there, but with Hogarth’s help, the Giant learns and grows and becomes more than just a metal man. And, more importantly, he goes against his clear mission to be a weapon of invasion, something sent by aliens to conquer Earth. He has the potential for good, to be a hero even. If only Hogarth could prove that to government agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), who wants nothing more than to see the Giant destroyed.

In some ways, The Iron Giant is a simple story. A kid meets a magical creature and befriends them. Adventures ensue. You could find a similar story throughout family fare, from 1986’s Flight of the Navigator to 2002’s Lilo and Stitch. Even having a government agent come in and try to capture the fallen alien mirrors plot points from Lilo and Stitch. This is one of those universal tropes that just works, letting a kid find happiness and fulfillment in learning to love, and protect, his new creature companion. It just so happens that in this case the creature is a giant, 50 foot tall, metal man.

Brad Bird and his animators do a wonderful job of turning the Iron Giant into a creature you want to care about. The basic design seems pretty minimal, but (not unlike with Number Five in Short Circuit) the details put into the robotic creature help give it life. Simple movements of the jaw, the dilation of the eyes, it all corresponds to make the creature seem like more than just metal, that he’s a living being with real feelings. That sense of life means you bond with the Giant, just like Hogarth does, and you want to see him succeed and thrive despite the odds.

The film changes a major plotline of the book, shifting the climax to focus not on the Giant defending the Earth from an external threat (in the book, a sky dragon) but the Earth’s own stupidity. Mansley wants to destroy the Giant so bad that he’s willing to throw the full weight of the U.S. military at it, and that risks all the lives within Rockwell in the process. This then means that when the Giant has his big hero moment, it’s not just to fight threats from beyond but to self-sacrifice to help humanity be better. That’s a real, noble way to show the Giant’s growth.

And if you don’t tear up at least a little when the Giant says, “Superman,” then you aren’t even human at all. Just saying.

The film does an excellent job of sucking you into its world and getting you to care. Hogarth should be an obnoxious little dweeb but, due to his intelligence and his attachment to the Giant, he’s more than just a sugared up eight-year-old. His mom feels like a trope character, the single parent who’s never there, but Aniston’s vocal performance, along with the animation put into Alice, expresses how much she cares for her son and helps to develop her character further. And there’s Harry Connick Jr.'s Dean McCoppin, the local artist and salvage dealer, who gets to act as a kind of comic relief (getting some of the best reaction shots and solid lines) while also developing as his own real character. The film treats everyone outside the Giant with as much care as it gives to the lead character.

Plus, the film is just gorgeous to look at. It uses a blend of 3D animation with 2D hand-drawn art that, honestly, blends better than anything even Disney put out at the time. It looks so rich and detailed but in an effortless way that few other films could achieve. It has an old school sensibility to it, setting it on that high shelf of animated works that, really, only Disney and those couple of Don Bluth films could hope to also stand upon. It really is a beautiful wonder and, had this film come out from any other studio, you have to assume it would have been a success. Easily and hands down.

But because Warner Bros. dropped the ball entirely, giving up before they’d even really started, The Iron Giant didn’t get its due in theaters. It has found its audience, and become a massive cult hit that everyone loves now, but that took time. The real shame is that it even had to be labeled as a bomb at all because this film is a masterpiece. There are few films, animated or otherwise, that are as good as this cast-aside gem.