The Iron Giant rewards a viewer who wants an animated film that trusts children with real feeling rather than gags.
Set in 1957 Maine, it follows Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal), a lonely boy who befriends a towering robot fallen from space, while his mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) and a wary beatnik played by Harry Connick Jr. try to keep the secret from a paranoid government agent. Brad Bird directed it as his feature debut, years before The Incredibles.
The film has been overlooked mainly because Warner Bros. barely gave it a chance to be seen. The studio had lost confidence in animation after the failure of Quest for Camelot the year before and delayed a release date until just months before launch, leaving almost no time to build a campaign. It opened on August 6, 1999, against The Sixth Sense, making just $5.7 million on its opening weekend against a $50 million budget, a textbook case of a studio mismanaging its own release rather than audiences rejecting the film.
What sets the film apart is how directly it uses a Cold War setting to make an anti-violence argument without turning preachy. The Giant, mistaken for a weapon by the adults around him, has to decide what kind of thing he wants to be, and Bird has said he built the story around asking what would happen if a gun had a soul and refused to be one, using Sputnik-era paranoia as the backdrop for a story about empathy overriding fear.
The clearest reason to save it now is the 2015 Signature Edition, a Warner Bros. and Fathom Events theatrical re-release and remaster that restored two scenes cut from the original print. That version is the one most streaming and disc releases now carry. Its critical reputation has only grown since: the film built a lasting cult following after home video and television exposure, and it is now regularly named among the best animated films made in America.
