In the widest possible sense, you could accuse The Iron Giant of being a retelling of E.T. There's the alien creature that lands on earth (here, the titular Iron Giant, a massive robot that lands in the ocean and comes ashore), the young boy who finds him and takes him in, the government agents trying to hunt him down, the boyish feel of adventure against the world. But as Roger Ebert always said, a movie is not about what it is about; it's about how it goes about it, and it's in those details that The Iron Giant becomes something truly wonderful. There's the Cold War-infused dread of the 1950's setting, which plays wonderfully not only off of the fears of nuclear war that inform the story, but also of the pulp sci-fi so often associated with the decade's films. There's the medium of animation, which gives the film a charming feel that makes it impossible to imagine the story told any other way. And there's the thematic depth of the whole thing, which finds the Giant struggling to understand his role in the universe and realizing that being a weapon and a fighter isn't necessarily something to aspire to. Indeed, in many ways, The Iron Giant is a response to so many other children's films, with violence becoming the problem, not the solution. (Look, for instance, at how most of the military figures of the film have no interest in violence, and those that do are triggered almost entirely by fear or a lack of understanding.) Yes, it's a sharply funny film, and yes, that climactic scene never fails to make me tear up a little bit with the beauty and simplicity of its sacrifice. But it's all of those things together that combine to make The Iron Giant such a wonderful film, one that takes what could have been a knockoff of a great film and makes its own great film instead, one that ends up resembling nothing so much as it resembles itself.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
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