Never Seen It #213: The Iron Giant

I thought you might like, you know, a bedtime story. I have some really cool ones. Mad Magazine, very funny. The Spirit, very cool. Boy's Life, eh. Oh, here. This is Puke on Your Birthday. He's a lot like you. Crash-landed on Earth, didn't know what he was doing, watched 400 movies he's never seen before... but he only uses his blogging powers for good, never for evil. Remember that.

The Iron Giant

1999

Brad Bird

I feel like this is the kind of movie that we take for granted these days. I watch these "family-friendly" films with my kids every week, and every week, I'm surprised to watch yet another new film that feels big and bold and important. And it's a cartoon! We were raised to think of animation as a lower art, some base fucking bullshit for kids to like and adults to endure. Some of it is still like that, sure. But there are also animated films that inspiring wonder and awe, and it's not too much to ask of a cartoon these days. Animation can be high art. Cartoons can blow you away.

The Iron Giant got there for me. The scene at the end that I will not spoil was perfect, awe-inducing, literally got me choked up there on the couch during Family Movie Night. The film leading up to that perfect climax was excellent too. It was a Cold War allegory, I guess? Or maybe not an allegory, but definitely taking place during the Cold War, at the dawn of the Space Race, the antagonist here a government employee extremely paranoid about the possibility of attack from foreign entities. It's that, but also a coming-of-age drama about a boy finding himself through an unlikely friendship with a giant metal robot alien. It felt good to get close to crying but it also felt good to laugh harder than me and Willow and Martha have laughed over a movie together in a long time. This was a fun one.

I'm framing it like this being a little more par-for-the-course in 2025 because I read some of the contemporaneous reviews, and a lot of them spoke to the idea that this was a "rare" animated film that "actually had something to say." Were things really that dire in the late '90s? I was there but I wasn't cognizant of it. I was slopping down that fucking swill with the rest of the kiddies, and I didn't give a shit about high art. But there's so much of that now that it feels like a wasted opportunity whenever me and my own kids watch something that is just fun and loud and doesn't really have much to say worth anything.

It also helps in retrospect that we know what director Brad Bird was going to move on to do. He directed Ratatouille! And yeah, both Incredibles films, and a few other live-action affairs, but, but, Ratatouille! Sincerely one of my favorite films of all time, and point-blank my favorite animated film ever. It's my favorite because it has something to say. The thing that it says is near and dear to my heart. But it's important and relevant that the vehicle for saying that thing is a cartoon! And this is all normal to me, ya know? I'm not marveling over the fact that it's a cartoon that manages to be a good movie. It's just one of my favorite films, no thought at all to the fact that it's animated or that it was made for families. It's a movie. Cartoons can be important. The Iron Giant proved it, and afterward, so many cartoons proved it that now it's not even a question.

And why shouldn't they? Because if you think back to a discussion for Frankenstein, you'll see that there's this idea that sometimes, limitations in filmmaking create greatness. The opposite, it seems, can be true too, and it manifests in the art of animation. If you can draw it, you can make it. The Iron Giant would have been pretty difficult to make as a live-action film. The scale would have been cut down, or it would have resulted in a lot of cheap-looking CGI (pretty much all the "live action" in Disney's recent live-action remakes involves this bullshit), or maybe would have resulted in something like the burning windmill scene in Frankenstein, where "implying" does a lot of work. Maybe The Iron Giant could be a good film if you only see his giant metal left foot. Or maaaaaaybe the fact that it was a cartoon guarantees that it's full of wonder and amazement, because anything is possible when you're drawing it.

In this way, the film's central theme can be reflected back onto its creation. Late in the film, the giant weapon mechanisms kick into gear, but his human pal convinces him that it doesn't have to be this way. "You are what you choose to be. You choose. Choose." Same goes for a movie. If in 1999 cartoons were kiddie fare bullshit not worth a damn, then The Iron Giant chose to be art. And we the audience can choose to accept that, or miss out on something special.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Group C hits us with their thoughts about Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.