A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Iron Giant

Date Viewed: 20 Aug, 1999

Details:

Voices:

Jennifer Anniston

Harry Connick, Jr.

Christopher McDonald

Eli Marienthal

Director: Brad Bird

Score: +

The Review: Warner Bros. animation.

Off the shores of a quiet Maine fishing town, something has splashed down at sea in the middle of a storm. An untrustworthy fisherman claims to have seen what it really was -- a giant iron man -- but is believed only by a child and the local beatnik. Since this is the late 1950's, immediately post-Sputnik in the midst of the Cold War, rumors run rampant. This allegory has multiple levels, including the story of a young boy befriending an unusual stranger, an unsubtle commentary on Cold War paranoia, and an ethical conflict about the use of weapons.

Characterization is OK. Jennifer Anniston voices an attractive (if harried) single mother (apparently a military widow). Harry Connick Jr. is excellent as the resident beatnik, artist and junkyard manager (a.k.a. fast food joint for a wandering, hungry robot). The hyperkinetic and nosy investigator (McDonald) from the federal BUP ("Bureau of Unexplained Phenomenon") is a cross between Fox Mulder and Joseph McCarthy, with a smidgen of J. Edgar Hoover thrown in -- an unappealing and unsympathetic character, and an ominous reminder of the 1950's. The cartoon within a cartoon, Duck and Cover, is a more amusing recollection of the nuclear hubris of the same era (and I'm convinced I've seen at least one real version of this "educational" film).

The genesis of this movie is quite interesting, involving (among others) the British Poet Laureate (to whom the movie is dedicated) and the rock group Who. The details of this story are commended to the reader: as long as they are available, see the official WB production notes. Derived from Laureate Ted Hughes' book The Iron Man (1968), and a step-child of Pete Townshend's The Iron Man rock musical (1989), it transmogrified along the way. As the director has explained, he modified the original story based on the following idea: "what if a gun had a soul, and decided not to be a gun?"

The quality of the animation is solid, but nothing really stands out. There's nothing to match the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast. or the hordes descending the mountain pass in Mulan, or the peasants dancing in Anastasia's St. Petersburg. The introductory pan and scan sections immediately following the titles are annoyingly blurry -- almost as if a DVD action movie were freeze-framed -- but most of the rest is clear.

One minor historical quibble. The first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, was indeed contemporaneous with the movie's avowed space/time continuum, so the reference is timely. As a Guppy-configuration, however, the Nautilus was not a ballistic missile carrier and did not have ICBM launch capability. It carried Regulus cruise missiles, but they had to be surface launched. Submersible, vertical-launched, nuclear-tipped Polaris capability only appeared only with the Albacore-derived George Washington class, which left the graving yards sometime in 1959. Even then, Polaris missiles were not dynamically re-targetable.

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