The best American animated feature of the last 20 years

Rating: 9/10 (11 March 2005)

Since the release of The Little Mermaid in 1989, Walt Disney Pictures has produced a cavalcade of animated masterpiece after animated masterpiece. That movie's success and the subsequent efforts from the same studio ushered in a renaissance of American animation. Megalomaniacal visionary Steve Jobs' belief in a small computer graphics studio, Pixar was directly responsible for the birth of the computer animation feature movie. Their list of accomplishments reads like a who's who and gave impetus to other creative forces to do the same. Since the seminal Toy Story, DreamWorks and Fox, among others, have followed Pixar's lead in that genre of animation. Yet, given Disney's pedigree and Pixar's mastery, one would be incredulous to learn that the best American-made animated movie of the last 20 years was directed by a virtual unknown (at the time) and was distributed (if you can call it that) by Warner Brothers and not any of the aforementioned masters of the art. That movie is the Iron Giant.
The story of the Iron Giant is a cross between Beauty and the Beast and ET. It opens in space with a shot of Sputnik panning across the screen and something hurtling from space towards the planet. That something is the title character, a giant robot. Once on earth, the Giant proceeds to dine indiscriminately on the earth's varied cuisine of metal and steel. The Giant is befriended and spared electrocution by a young boy named Hogarth Hughes. The rest of movie tracks the two main characters on their quest to evade detection, have fun, and munch on all the metal that can be had. Along the way, the viewers are treated to a terrific parable about the futility of violence. Set against the backdrop of the early days of the Space Race, the reality of the Cold War helps to contrast the message the movie is sending.
The day may be fast approaching where computers and animators can replicate the entire gamut of human emotions and characteristics and render a digital "actor" as realistic and compelling as any Academy Award winner. What the computers may not be able to ever do though is replicate the raw emotion that can be discerned from the human voice. In The Iron Giant, the emotions that come to the fore more often are joy, exuberance, and wonder. It is a testament to the actors involved in this feature that the characters are so compelling. Eli Marienthal voices the character of Hogarth with such delight that we can't help but wonder what has gone wrong in our world that we can't feel the same level of enjoyment. The fact that the young Mr. Marienthal is given such tremendous material only helps. Hogarth is an optimistic young man; he thinks the best of everyone and everything and one can't help but wonder if such open-mindedness is as a mechanism erected to keep out the rigors of growing up as a latch-key kid in a single parent home. And, his understanding of death as a part of life makes perfect sense when one considers the fact that this child has been subjected to the "duck and cover" instructional in school every year of his short life.
If joy and optimism define Hogarth, then wonder defines the Giant. "Voiced" by Vin Diesel, the Iron Giant starts off as a enigmatic brute and transforms into an amalgam of childhood, best friend and parental figure. The young thespian gets very few lines of understandable dialog but those that he does get, he delivers with a tenderness that contrasts the mechanical nature of his character.
Along with the two protagonists, the rest of the voice work is also excellent. Jennifer Aniston does a good job as Hogarth's single mother, conveying the exasperation a mother must feel when she has to deal with a bright child with an overactive imagination. Harry Connick Jr. is amusing as the beatnik scrap dealer, Dean who Hogarth befriends and who in turn befriends the giant. It goes without say that, given his philosophical tendencies, Dean is the first to accept what Hogarth has to say about the giant's benevolence. Finally, John Mahoney as General Rogard and Christopher McDonald as federal agent, Kent Mansley are also very good. The former comes across as the same sort of caring realist he played in Say Anything without the pen chance for fraud. The latter is positively delicious as a fed that has bought in to all the hype of the Cold War; he is truly drinking the McCarthy Kool Aid. In fact, if he weren't such a despicable guy who does some pretty despicable things, you can almost feel sorry for him.
Technically speaking, the Iron Giant pales somewhat when compared to some of the other animated features that are its contemporaries. Even from a traditional animation standpoint, there are contemporaries whose craft stands out more than that of this film. And the main story itself is also simple. What makes this movie terrific is its heart. It gives us characters that we care for, human and otherwise and along the way of the story, it tries to teach it's audience profound lessons on fear and on violence as a solution (or, in this case, non-solution).
9 stars out of 10