THE IRON GIANT: Heavy Metal for your soul

THE IRON GIANT is that rarity of rarities: a great animated movie for kids with some real intelligence in it instead of just syrupy sweet songs and platitudes and plotline (yawn).

The first real predecessor to The Iron Giant was a robot named Gort that belonged to a space wanderer named Klaatu in the classic 1951 Sci-Fi blockbuster THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Gort was a nice robot until you messed with his master Klaatu, and then he could get hacked off and put your lights out. There are a lot if similarities between Gort and this bigger extraterrestial robot in THE IRON GIANT. 50 years haven't dimmed the way we think about "friendly" extraterrestial robots I guess (or ET's for that matter.). In that sense they represent a human wish projection: If extraterrestials come, let them be technological, so we can study them and maybe re-program them for our own control, and let them be benign. For heaven's sake, don't give them a mind of their own. Then we can't control them, and we humans insist on being In Control. (Just ask the androids in BLADE RUNNER.)

But in this movie, set in the 1950s, a boy makes friends with this big iron giant who accidentally drops from outer space. A lot of kids today won't understand the ironies that those of us who grew up in the 50's and 60's will, with all the Cold War propaganda and paranoia of those so-called "Happy Days." It is that propaganda and paranoia that becomes the danger and the threat to the existence of The Iron Giant. Instead of treating our extraterrestrial visitor as a guest, the military-industrial complex wants to blow him to smithereens in the same way they shot the medical miracle device Klaatu was going to give the people of Earth in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. I guess fear never changes in the military-industrial complex. Our first impulse is to kill those we do not understand. One wonders: "Why would anyone want to visit Earth? They shoot you down there, pardner."

Anyway, there is a message in the middle of all this for any kid or adult who chooses to hear. The little boy, named Hogarth learns: "you are what you choose to be." So simple a truth is all too easily overlooked, yet this truth is well portrayed here.

I loved the fact that there were not hosts of cute little animals, smiling-faced stars, and other cutesy-pie juvanilla in this cartoon feature. It was just a great movie for kids (and adults) who think.

At the end the Giant starts to come back together across the miles after being blasted into pieces. I couldn't help but think of that old spiritual "Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again." This movie is about hope that triumphs over fear and stupidity. It is a testimony, too, that animated movies can be more than the syrup of cutesy-pie-ness or the anarchistic blitzkrieg we too often see in anime. It is just a good, straight story with good straight characters in a great little story. I hope we see more like it.

_________________
Voices of:
Jennifer Anniston (Annie Hughes)
Eli Marienthal (Hogarth Hughes)

Directed by: Brad Bird (A Simpsons veteran and that influence shows here.)
_____________________________
The Iron Giant. 1999

****