- Did you ever wonder if Superman could have turned out differently? Certainly comics have considered this possibility many times over the years with various Ultramen, Superboys and Superboys Prime, and even Mark Millar's Superman: Red Son that landed the Man of Steel in the middle of the Soviet Union. Brad Bird's The Iron Giant is admittedly the first film to ask whether Superman would have turned out the same if he had been a giant alien robot in Maine instead of merely a Kryptonian in Kansas. But perhaps this is not a fair comparison since the Iron Giant (Vin Diesel), as he is known, also has access to a better source of inspiration than Superman ever did: namely, those very same Action Comics that introduced the world to Superman in the first place.
- When the Giant first crash-lands on Earth, however, his path in life is anything but clear. Apparently without a memory of how or why he came to our planet, the automaton lumbers around chomping metal for sustenance until he finds himself tangled up in the cables of a local power plant. Young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), a science fiction aficionado attracted to the robot's swath of destruction, helps get to extricate the Giant and soon finds himself rewarded with a new enormous and somewhat unmanageable friend. Naturally, this is not a development that Hogarth's mother (Jennifer Aniston) would approve of, given how she reacted to Hogarth's pet squirrel. Fortunately, a local beatnik metal sculptor named Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick, Jr.) reluctantly allows the Giant to crash (sometimes literally) at his scrap yard. I should have mentioned that the film is set in the Sputnik-era 1950's, so maybe encountering a beatnik who owns a junkyard would not be so unlikely.
- It's at this point that trouble enters this animated tale through the usual channels: deer hunters and government agents. First, the Iron Giant witnesses a live re-enactment of that scene from Bambi (you know the one) and shows indications of overreacting before recomposing himself. Then, there's Agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), an unctuous badge-flasher from the "Bureau of Unexplained Phenomena" who makes tracking down the Giant his number one priority. This is unfortunately where the film sheds some of its considerable charm since Mansley is such an over-the-top knucklehead that he quickly steers the entire proceedings into parody. Flash-forward a few scenes and tanks are launching shells at the Giant, who responds with best impression of Frankenstein meets War of the Worlds. Hopefully Hogarth can find a way to tone the Giant down before the army permanently turns him off.
- So why, by the end of The Iron Giant, did I feel disappointed? After all, this is a film about a giant robot who idolizes Superman and tacitly pays homage to Cold War-era science fiction masterpieces like The Day the Earth Stood Still--seems like a sure winner, right? Certainly the film's look is not the source of its problems. The animation style, a composite of traditional hand-drawn art seamlessly integrated with CGI, is impressive, and the design work that went into both the robot and 1950's Americana is superb. No, I think the real problem is that The Iron Giant, much like its hero, is just a little too simple-minded. While the robot's clumsy ruminations on guns and souls may have been sufficiently profound for the youth of the 1950's, today's kids should expect more from their cartoons, particularly since the advent of Pixar Animation Studios. At least The Iron Giant delivers a better Superman story than the actual Superman comics of the late 1990's, but I had hoped it would earn much stronger praise than that.
- Further voice work provided by Cloris Leachman, John Mahoney, and M. Emmet Walsh.
- Based on the book by Ted Hughes.
