The Iron Giant Review

Brad Bird sold the film to Warner Bros. on one question, what if a gun had a soul and did not want to be a gun, and everything in The Iron Giant serves it. Hogarth Hughes teaches the Giant about comic books, death and the difference between a hero and a weapon, and Tim McCanlies's script leaves the robot's origin blank so the story stays on that friendship. It treats Cold War paranoia, in the shape of Christopher McDonald's federal agent Kent Mansley, as the real monster.

The craft is remarkable for a film Bird said had a third of a Disney budget and half the schedule. The Giant is computer generated but animated on twos so he sits inside the hand-drawn world, the CinemaScope frames borrow from Rockwell and Hopper, and Michael Kamen's score, recorded with the Czech Philharmonic, stays warm rather than martial. Eli Marienthal gives Hogarth real speed and Harry Connick Jr.'s beatnik scrap sculptor supplies the dry wit; Mansley, broad as a cartoon, is the one weak note.

Warner Bros. barely marketed it, and it grossed 31.7 million dollars against a budget of about 50 million before television and home video made it a classic. The final act turns on a single word the Giant learned from a comic book, and it is fully earned.