don't be a gun

Rating: 7/10 (23 August 1999)

WB certainly took some risks here. An animated flick with no musical numbers, no cute little animal sidekicks, blood, and a couple "damn"s, "hell"s and even a "screw"? Overall, I think it worked fairly well. Nice animation, retro-design characters, simple but sophisticated plot, and just the right touch of visual humor, e.g. the robot mimicking the child's postures, the detached hand running amok through the house, etc. Ignore the preachy anti-gun message (which was, by the way, lost on the younger kids in the audience - my four year old thought the iron giant was cool because "he had all those guns that could blow up tanks"), and you have yourself one very entertaining movie. Maybe they could have made the moral more reasonable, i.e. "gun's can be good if used defensively", but I guess that would have (** spoiler alert!! **) made the ending far less dramatic - a blast from one of the robot's lasers would probably have sufficed.
I saw "Iron Giant" a few weeks after release, and the theater was, sadly, almost empty. Word-of-mouth and critic reviews have been very good, so I guess we would have to chalk it up to poor marketing. Hope this doesn't sour Hollywood on an alternative to the standard Disney formula.
Its no "Beauty and the Beast", but I would still give it a solid 7.5/10. Runs circles around any non-Disney animation I have seen yet.