10 / 10
Official trailer
The Flop That Became a Classic
The Iron Giant flopped. Warner Bros released it in the summer of 1999 with almost no marketing, audiences didn’t know it existed, and it made back a fraction of its budget. Within a few years it ranked among the most loved animated films ever made, passed from hand to hand on video by people who couldn’t believe they’d missed it, and it now sits comfortably beside the best of Pixar and Disney. It’s a great injustice of modern film distribution, and a great recovery.
Brad Bird directed it, his first feature, before he went on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille at Pixar. Tim McCanlies wrote the screenplay from Bird’s adaptation of Ted Hughes’ 1968 children’s book The Iron Man. It’s a 10, and it works completely for children and completely for adults at the same time, without ever talking down to either.
I adore this film without a single reservation. It’s a cartoon about a robot that manages to be funny, frightening and heartbreaking inside ninety minutes, and it asks children to think about guns, death and choosing who they are without once lecturing them. If I had to hand somebody one animated film to prove the form can do anything, I’d hand them this one.
It’s also a film with a very clear argument, stated by its hero in six words near the end, and it backs up every one of them. Those words are the line everyone remembers, and they come from a cartoon about a robot. That says a great deal about how deeply the film reached people once it finally found them, years after its release.
Maine, 1957
The film opens in space. The Soviet satellite Sputnik passes overhead, and behind it, something huge falls out of the sky and into the sea off the coast of Maine. A fisherman sees it in a storm, and nobody believes him. It’s October 1957, the height of the Cold War, and the whole country is frightened of what might be coming from the sky.
Hogarth Hughes is nine years old, lives with his widowed mother in the small town of Rockwell, and has an overactive imagination fed on science fiction comics and monster films. One night, he follows a trail of destruction into the woods and finds the giant, tangled in the power lines of an electrical substation, being electrocuted. He switches off the power and saves it.
The giant, grateful, follows him home. It’s fifty feet tall, it eats metal, and it has no memory of where it came from or what it was built to do. Hogarth decides to keep it. It’s exactly what any nine-year-old would decide. The comedy of the next act comes from a boy trying to hide something the size of a building from his mother, his town and the United States government, and very nearly managing it.
A Boy and His Robot
The heart of the film is the friendship between Hogarth and the giant, and few friendships in animation are as touching. Hogarth teaches the giant to speak, to read comics and to play. The giant, childlike and gentle, learns quickly, and the two of them spend their days in the woods, swimming in the lake and hiding from the adults.
Vin Diesel voices the giant, with only a handful of words, and he’s superb. The giant’s voice is deep, slow and tender, and every word he learns feels like a small victory. The animators, working in a style that blends computer animation for the giant with traditional hand-drawn animation for everything else, give him a face that can show wonder, fear and grief with a few small movements of his eyes and jaw.
Eli Marienthal voices Hogarth with a perfect mix of cheek, enthusiasm and loneliness. He’s a boy whose father died and whose mother works long shifts, and the giant gives him a friend at exactly the moment he needs one. The film never spells that out. It just shows you.
Bird is right to let the two of them be silly before anything is at stake. A boy and a fifty-foot machine goofing around in a lake looks like filler, and it’s the stretch of the film that makes the ending hurt, because you’ve watched the friendship happen instead of being told about it.
Superman
Hogarth gives the giant a stack of comics, and the giant sees Superman and is captivated. Hogarth tells him that Superman is a hero, a being from another world with great powers who chooses to use them to help people. The giant sees a picture of an evil robot in another comic and becomes upset, because it looks like him.
The scene is small and important. The giant has been built as a weapon, although neither he nor Hogarth knows it yet, and he’s afraid of what he might be. Hogarth tells him he doesn’t have to be what he was made for. He can choose. The giant decides he wants to be Superman.
The Superman motif runs through the whole film, and it pays off at the end in a way that makes grown adults cry. Few animated films use a single idea this well, and it never feels forced, because it comes from the way a real child talks about comics, with total seriousness and total faith.
For Writers
The giant sees Superman in a comic and decides that’s who he wants to be. The whole ending grows from that one small choice made early in the film.
When you write a character’s climactic decision, it works best when it was planted as a small, almost throwaway moment much earlier.
Find the decision your hero makes at the climax, and go back and plant its seed in a quiet early scene, where it seems like nothing more than a character detail.
Dean
Hogarth needs somewhere to hide a fifty-foot robot that eats metal, and he finds it at a scrapyard run by Dean McCoppin, a laid-back beatnik artist who makes sculptures out of junk. Harry Connick Jr. voices Dean, and he’s wonderful: cool, dry, sceptical and, when it counts, completely trustworthy.
Dean is the adult who sees the giant for what it is, a gentle creature and not a monster, and who helps Hogarth protect it. He’s also a small portrait of a certain kind of fifties outsider, an artist in a conservative town who is scornful of the paranoia around him. His relationship with Hogarth’s mother, played by Jennifer Aniston, develops gently in the background, and it’s lovely.
He also gets many of the film’s funniest moments, especially when the giant starts making art in the scrapyard, and Dean realizes, with horror and professional admiration, that the robot has more talent than he does. It’s a lovely running joke, and it’s also part of the film’s argument: a machine built for war turns out to have an artist inside it, if someone gives it the chance.
Kent Mansley
The threat comes from Kent Mansley, a government agent sent to investigate the reports of a giant metal creature. Christopher McDonald voices him as an ambitious, paranoid, cowardly bureaucrat who sees Soviet plots everywhere and wants to be the man who saves America from them. He’s pompous, jumpy and always out of his depth, and McDonald plays him with a comic energy that makes his cowardice funny until it becomes dangerous.
Mansley moves into Hogarth’s house as a lodger, spies on the boy and eventually finds proof of the giant. He calls in the army, led by General Rogard, voiced by John Mahoney, a more sensible man who is slowly persuaded that the giant is a threat. Mansley is the real villain of the film, and he’s frightening because he’s ordinary: a man who fears everything he doesn’t understand and will destroy it to protect himself.
Mansley is the villain I most enjoy despising in American animation. He’s the kind of coward who’d flatten a town to cover his own panic, and McDonald makes him so pompous and jumpy that every scene he walks into sets my teeth on edge, which is exactly the job. He’s also the film’s clearest picture of Cold War paranoia, the atmosphere of duck-and-cover drills and suspicion that runs through the whole story. The film includes a school duck-and-cover film that Hogarth watches with scorn. It tells you everything about the world Mansley represents.
The Deer
In a powerful scene, Hogarth and the giant find a deer in the woods, and it enchants the giant. Then hunters shoot it. The giant is baffled and upset. Hogarth tries to explain death to him: that things die, that it’s sad and that it’s part of life.
The robot asks whether he will die too.
Hogarth tells him he doesn’t know, but that souls don’t die. For a family film, the conversation is moving, simple and truthful, and it sets up the ending completely. The metal man has learned what a gun does and what death means, and both lessons will matter.
This is the moment the film shows us the giant’s other side. When he sees a gun pointed at him, even a toy one, his eyes turn red and his defenses activate, and weapons unfold from his body. He was built to destroy, and he can’t entirely help it.
For Writers
The deer scene teaches the giant about guns and death. Two lessons in one quiet moment set up everything the ending needs.
Give your hero one calm scene where they learn a lesson they don’t yet understand the importance of. Pay it off at the story’s most intense moment.
A quiet scene in the middle of an adventure can carry more weight than any action sequence if it teaches your character something they’ll need later.
The Weapon
When the army finally attacks, the giant’s defenses take over completely. He transforms into a war machine, with guns, rays and missiles, and begins destroying the soldiers and tanks around him.
That’s a terrifying sequence, and it reveals to the audience what the giant really is. Hogarth, horrified, runs toward him and calls him back, reminding him that he doesn’t have to be a gun.
The robot stops. Then Mansley, in a panic, orders a nuclear missile launched from a submarine offshore at the giant, forgetting that the giant is standing in the middle of the town. The missile will destroy everyone. Mansley tries to flee, and General Rogard stops him. There’s nothing anyone can do.
You Are Who You Choose to Be
The metal man tells Hogarth, you stay, I go, no following. Then he flies straight up into the sky to meet the missile before it can reach the town, and as he rises, he closes his eyes and smiles and says one word, the name of the hero he chose to be.
The explosion lights up the sky, the town is saved, and the robot is gone. That closed-eyed smile and that one word wreck me, and I think it’s the most moving sacrifice in any animated film because the film has spent ninety minutes building toward it: the Superman comics, the deer, the conversation about souls and Hogarth telling the giant, again and again, that he can choose who he is.
The epilogue is quiet and hopeful. Dean makes a memorial sculpture. Hogarth receives a single bolt, and in the night it starts to move. Far away, on a glacier in Iceland, the pieces of the giant are finding each other. This is a perfect ending, sad and hopeful at the same time, and it gives children something to hold on to after the heartbreak of the sacrifice, while leaving adults to decide for themselves what it means.
For Writers
The metal man chooses to fly into the missile. His sacrifice is the answer to every question the film has asked about who he is.
For a sacrifice to move the reader, it has to be the logical conclusion of the character’s whole trip.
Before you write your character’s sacrifice, list every scene where they struggled with the question it answers. If the list is short, strengthen the struggle first. I cover this in more depth in my piece on character deaths that matter.
How It Was Made
Brad Bird had wanted to direct feature animation for years, and he brought a live-action filmmaker’s sense of framing and pace to the film. The robot was animated with computer graphics, then drawn over by hand so he would fit the hand-drawn world around him, and the blend is invisible. The design of the town, the woods and the fifties interiors is warm and specific, and it feels like a real place.
Michael Kamen wrote the score, and it’s big, sweeping and emotional, full of fifties atmosphere. Ted Hughes, who wrote the original book, died in 1998, a year before the film was released. Pete Townshend, who had turned the book into a rock album and stage musical, was one of the film’s executive producers.
The failure at the box office is usually blamed on Warner Bros.
It had just had a disaster with another animated film and gave this one almost no marketing. Brad Bird went on to Pixar, and the film found its audience on video and television. Cartoon Network showed it repeatedly in the early 2000s, and a whole generation discovered it there. It’s how a flop turned into a classic.
Warner Bros deserves every bit of the blame. A studio had a film this good in its hands and let it die in a summer release with almost no marketing, and the only reason it survived is that audiences went and found it themselves. That still counts as a crime against the film.
Where It Sits
It sits at the very top of American animation, alongside the best of Pixar and the classic Disney films. That’s a Cold War story, a boy-and-his-dog story and a meditation on violence and choice, all at once, and it never feels heavy. It’s funny, often very funny, and it moves fast.
The film grew in meaning over time. Its argument, that you don’t have to be what you were made for, has connected with audiences for twenty-five years. This is an argument that feels more urgent in an age of machines built for purposes their users may never fully understand. Watch it with your children. Watch it on your own. It will get you at the end.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Iron Giant builds its entire climax out of one early choice. The metal man decides he wants to be Superman, and every scene after it, the deer, the guns, the talk about souls, tests whether he can live up to that.
In a story about identity, the reader needs to see the choice made, tested and then paid for. A choice that’s never tested is only a wish.
Show your character choosing who they want to be early, then build three escalating tests of that choice, each harder than the last, before the final one.
The Verdict on The Iron Giant
Absolutely. It’s a 10 because nothing in it is wasted.
The comedy, the Cold War paranoia, the deer and the Superman comics all feed the last ten minutes, and those last ten minutes flatten me. I can’t find a scene I’d cut or a line I’d change. Watch it with someone you love, and keep tissues close.
