The Iron Giant
/vin diesel as the iron giant & eli marienthal as hogarth
It’s bad to kill, but it’s not bad to die.
~ Hogarth
quick fox: B+ | Silver
winding dragon
I’m glad I don’t live in small-town suburbia during the Cold War, because if there’s anything I’ve learned from watching movies and television, is that there’s a 100% chance an alien is going to land in my hometown. The kids in Stranger Things experience the “Upside Down”; Joe Lamb forms a telepathic connection with the alien in Super 8; and let’s not forget E.T.’s love for Reeses’s Pieces chocolate.
For the residents of Rockwell, Maine, their small town is about to go nuclear when a giant metal android (Vin Diesel) crashes to earth from outer space. Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), an inquisitive boy with a habit of bringing stray animals home, discovers the Man of Steel in the forest and the two become fast friends. Hogarth names the robot the “Iron Giant,” teaches it a basic English vocabulary, and feeds it metal from the local junkyard. But Hogarth also discovers that hiding the Iron Giant is a lot more difficult than befriending it. It’s one thing to fool his mother, (Jennifer Aniston); it’s another matter when special agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) and the full force of the military comes knocking at his doorstep.
The Iron Giant (1999) is a film that you appreciate more as you grow older. It doesn’t have the same action-packed comedy as Brad Bird’s other animated classic, The Incredibles (2004), because it develops the friendship between Hogarth and the Iron Giant. Most of their time together is rather uneventful (relative to having a giant android as a friend), playing in the scrapyard, or spent looking at Superman comic books (fun fact: the issue Hogarth shows the Iron Giant is Action Comics #188, released in Jan. 1954).
What’s more, the film is a pretty bold concept, as it roots itself firmly within the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation and depicts that fear from a child’s point of view. The scene where Hogarth is in school learning about “duck and cover” tactics was nonsensical to me as a little kid, but watching the movie now after studying that period, the scene takes on a much more ominous meaning. Even the egocentric agent Mansley, despite his sinister demeanor and imbecilic actions—as the General says, “You just blew millions of Uncle Sam’s dollars out of your butt!”—becomes slightly more sympathetic when considering him as a man crippled by the very real threat of nuclear war.
Obviously, the driving force of the film is Hogart and the Iron Giant's friendship. Forging a friendship between two dissimilar characters who feel like they don’t belong in the community is a common motif, but where The Iron Giant separates itself is that it's one of the few animated films that I know of that confronts death in such a direct and open way. The highlight scene is when Hogart is trying to comfort the Iron Giant after they witness two hunters kill a deer. It’s an unusual situation to say the least—a kid explaining to a humongous war machine what death means. Hogart is struggling to think of the words to say, but the best he can do is, “It’s bad to kill, but it’s not bad to die.” It’s a beautiful piece of foreshadowing, as it sets up the Iron Giant’s sacrifice at the end.