The best animated film to ever originate on U.S. soil!

Rating: Null/10 (2 November 2002)

I took my daughter and a few of her cousins to see this when it was in the theater, and now my 2 year old loves to watch it on DVD. This is one of those rare films that I can watch over and over and during certain scenes I still feel a wave of emotion overcome me. The backdrop for this movie, the last 1950s, makes me long for a world where the Internet is not king, where there isn't a McDonalds and a Starbucks on every corner, where our kids aren't jammed into schools with 4,000 other kids on a regular basis, where crime isn't the standard instead of the exception. This movie does almost everything right. It tells an incredible story, and while certain messages can come across too heavy handed for my tastes, such as the references to guns, 99.5% of this movie is perfection in every way. I've seen some people complain about the use of foul language in this movie, to which I say to these people to realize that to wake up, foul language is a part of life, and the more you ban your kids from it, the more they'll use it when you're not around (Yes, your kids.). This movie was a complete and utter failure at the box office, which is nothing if not a travesty and a slap in the face to good, hard working animation houses while we keep dropping $8 a pop to see fluff like Lilo and Stitch and countless sequels to Disney movies in which the originals weren't very good in the first place. People treat movies like Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Toy Story like some sort of gods of animated features, while Iron Giant surpasses them all in every way. Will we ever see Iron Giant on an Imax screen though? No, Imax is apparently reserved for second rate mainstream junk like Fantasia 2000. It's sad that we live in a society where fans of "Walker, Texas Ranger" are the norm, and where a few lightly sprinkled 4-letter words can take an increidible movie into the dumper. If you have never seen Iron Giant, you owe it to yourself to experience it, not from the eyes of a religious zealot who only sees the world as church, car washes and private christian academies, but from the eyes of an American, someone who loves the world and takes everything in life as a challenge instead of trying to whittle away the "bad" things.