Film
The Iron Giant
- Director
- Brad Bird
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 86 mins
Warner Brothers’ first exercise in feature animation, Space Jam, was an insultingly bad, cynical exercise in product placement, which cleaned up at the box office. Astonishingly, the studio’s 1999 adaptation of Ted Hughes’s 1968 children’s book took the opposite route. It’s witty, sophisticated and determinedly retro, unsullied by comedy animals or crap songs, and even boasts a good old-fashioned, mildly subversive message. American audiences stayed at home in droves.
The story begins with the launch of the Sputnik satellite back in 1957. America is in the grip of Cold War paranoia when the eponymous hulking tin leviathan crashlands in the woods near the home of nine-year-old science fiction enthusiast Hogarth Hughes. Boy and metal-munching robot promptly bond in familiar ET-style. But when sinister, xenophobic G-Man Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) starts sniffing around, Hogarth recruits beatnik artist Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr) to conceal his clanking chum.
Although it’s transposed to America, King of the Hill and The Simpsons alumnus and future The Incredibles and Ratatouille director Brad Bird resists all temptation to update the story Hughes originally wrote to cheer up his nippers after glum mum Sylvia Plath topped herself. The giant looks as though it could have tumbled out of a ‘50s toybox, the naughtiest thing the kid gets up to is speeding on espresso with hipster McCoppin, and much fun is had at the expense of A-bomb public information films like Duck and Cover. Its commendable pacifism is probably as unfashionable now as it was then, depicting the military as hate-filled cowardly buffoons and presenting the alien interloper with a moral choice between emulating the heroic Superman or the demonic Atomo. Clean and richly-detailed, the animation is quite extraordinary, melding the 3D computer-modelled giant seamlessly with traditional 2D characters and backgrounds.
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