A box-office failure at the time of release, The Iron Giant (1999) was nevertheless recognized by animation fans and professionals as one of the best films to come out of the "animation boom" of the 1990s, and deserving of space on the list of classic cartoon features from any era. Within a few years of release, general audiences discovered the film as well, embracing its well-told, simple story, its heart and its timeless quality.

The Iron Giant was the first animated feature directed by Brad Bird. Bird had been something of an animation prodigy, having submitted his first cartoon to Disney Studios at the age of 13. The studio was impressed by the effort and Bird was mentored by one of the legendary Nine Old Men of Disney animation, Milt Kahl. After going through Disney's CalArts program of studies, Bird's first major solo work was the highly regarded "Family Dog," a 1987 episode of Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories anthology series. Also for Spielberg, Bird co-scripted the live-action film *batteries not included (1987). For much of the 1990s Bird avoided theatrical animation and concentrated on the then-freer environs of Prime Time TV, becoming a consultant and occasional layout artist on The Simpsons, The Critic, and King of the Hill. By 1997 Bird was developing a feature film project with Turner Feature Animation called Ray Gunn. Turner merged with Warner Bros., however, and Bird found himself at Warner Bros. Animation with a no-go project. Given the chance to pick from other projects being looked at by the studio, Bird happened upon a drawing of a little boy with a giant robot. The project was a potential adaptation of a British book, as filtered through the sensibilities of a British rock star. The book was The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, first published in 1968. (Hughes had written the book for his two children--to help explain to them the 1963 suicide death of their mother, American poet Sylvia Plath.) In 1989 The Who frontman Pete Townshend had adapted the book into a solo concept album, also called The Iron Man. After finding its way to the stage, the property ended up in the hands of Warner Bros., brought there by Townshend as a possible animated film using the music he had written.

Bird saw great potential in the Hughes book, but he wanted to Americanize the story and fashion it to his own tastes. As he explained at the time of release, "Hughes' book is a great story that tries to show kids about the cycle of life--even though there is death, life has a continuity. My version is based around a question I asked the execs at Warner Bros.--what if a gun had a soul and chose not to be a gun? Basically I wanted to honor the book, but also take it in a new direction." The filmmakers sent Hughes a copy of the near-finished script, which he approved of, saying that the new story had "...terrific sinister gathering momentum and the ending came to me as a glorious piece of amazement." (Unfortunately, Hughes died in October, 1998 and never saw the finished film).

In Hughes' book, the Iron Man's origins are totally unexplained--he simply rises from the sea. The Iron Giant opens with a journey through space. A form enters Earth's orbit, and passes the small Soviet satellite, Sputnik. The form enters the atmosphere of Earth near a raging storm at sea and splashes into the water. In a small town in Rockwell, Maine, in the fall of 1957, we meet single mother Annie Hughes (voiced by Jennifer Aniston), waiting tables in the local diner. She has her hands full raising her nine-year old son Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal), who possesses a boisterous nature and a vivid imagination. In the diner, fishermen tell of seeing a giant metal man falling to the sea. The tales are ignored; everyone is jumpy because of the Soviet satellite currently circling the globe. Hogarth ventures out at night, however, and not only does he stumble upon the Iron Giant (voiced by Vin Diesel), he saves the metal-eating robot-man from being destroyed by the raging electricity of a power plant. Hogarth communicates with his new friend, and hides him in a junkyard run by Dean (voiced by Harry Connick, Jr.), a local beatnik artist. Because of rumors of a possible Soviet secret weapon in the area, government agent Kent Mansley (voiced by Christopher McDonald) begins to snoop around. Hogarth, with Dean's help, keeps the Iron Giant out of sight and also discovers the true nature of the Giant's purpose--a purpose that the Iron Giant himself comes to question.

Bird's goal was to make a film for all ages, not one strictly for children. As he told IGN FilmForce in an interview, "I can't name another art form on the face of the Earth that limits its audience by saying it's aimed at one age group...I have people asking me what it's like to be working in the animation genre. It's not a genre. It's an art form that can do any genre, and it's been limited by people's perceptions, but I think it can tell any story there is." As Bird further explained in Animation World Magazine, "Warner Bros. has offered me my first opportunity to do something in feature animation outside of 'the familiar tale set to Broadway music' formula, but with a budget sufficient to execute it here, in this country, under one roof and in full animation....With a production schedule a year shorter and a budget less than half the size of our friends at either of the two D's (Disney and DreamWorks), our margin for error is minuscule."

In his article for Animation World Magazine, Bird described the all-important storyboarding process, and how it affected the final scripting: "Simply put, the Disney method is to develop the 'business' of the story (gags, situations, emotions, etc) completely before dealing with how the business is to be presented....[But] it became increasingly harder for me to have an idea without simultaneously imagining how the idea was staged." So, Bird returned to a method of animation that was tried-and-true during the Golden Age of theatrical cartoon shorts (such as the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and the Tom & Jerry cartoons made at MGM): he and writer Tim McCanlies polished the script and developed story embellishments during the storyboard process. To aid in the eventual timing and pacing of the film, the storyboard was constantly updated as a moving, timed electronic entity by inputting the artwork into the After Effects program. Here, possible camera movements, staging, and timing decisions could be tried out before the scenes were even handed out to the animators. The resulting "story reels" were helpful in showing how the finished film would flow kinetically--both to studio executives and to the animation crew itself.

Not all of the film was animated traditionally--the Iron Giant himself was a computer-generated (CGI) creation. Great pains were taken, however, to integrate the CG Giant into the hand-drawn world of the rest of the film. Effects designer and live-action director Joe Johnston helped design the Giant--a deceptively simple-looking retro robot featuring great obvious strength and size, yet a "blank" looking face that could reflect varied emotions. Johnston said, "He has a simple jaw shape that can't really bend into a smile or a frown, but he has other ways of expressing thoughts and ideas through physical movements." The computer-generated lines of the Giant were actually downgraded during production to give the Giant a more hand-drawn feel; the crew came up with a computer program that gave the lines a slight "wobble."

Bird decided to shoot The Iron Giant in CinemaScope-style widescreen, "...even though I was warned that you don't ever want to shoot tall things in that kind of wide-screen." The decision made it that much more difficult to create compositions, but Bird felt that the process was more immersive for the audience, and besides, "...a lot of movies in the late '50s were shot in 'Scope, so I thought it was appropriate for a movie set in 1957."

Bird broke again with the then-current mode of feature production when it came to assigning animators. The practice at Disney had long been to assign a specific character to one animator, so that an animating supervisor would only be responsible for drawing one character. Bird decided to play up an animator's strength and assign them entire scenes based on the emotion or action, regardless of which character appeared. Because of this, several animators might draw different sections of the same scene. This practice, too, was a throwback to the way cartoons were done in the Golden Age, such as by Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett and his unit at Warner Bros.

The Iron Giant only made $23 million in its first three months of release, a poor figure for a major studio animated feature. In its release to home video and in subsequent TV showings, audiences discovered the film and responded to both the simple charm of the story as well as some of the more complex themes touched on in the multi-layered film. As Bird told Salon.com in an interview, "...we have to deal with our technological sophistication versus our spiritual sophistication--and technology always seems to be ahead of where we are spiritually. The machine in the movie ends up representing our own inventive side of ourselves and begs the question: Is it a good thing, or is it a dangerous thing?" Following The Iron Giant, Bird became the first outside director to helm a feature at Pixar Animation Studios. The resulting CGI-animated film, The Incredibles (2004), was a box-office smash and acknowledged by many as the best Pixar movie to date.

Producer: Allison Abbate, Des McAnuff
Executive Producer: Pete Townshend, John Walker
Director: Brad Bird
Screenplay: Tim McCanlies
Story: Brad Bird, (based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes)
Cinematography: Steven Wilzbach
Film Editing: Darren T. Holmes
Music: Michael Kamen
Production Design: Mark Whiting
Art Direction: Alan Bodner
Voice Cast: Jennifer Aniston (Annie Hughes), Harry Connick, Jr. (Dean McCoppin), Vin Diesel (The Iron Giant), James Gammon (Marv Loach, Floyd Turbeaux, General Sudokoff), Cloris Leachman (Mrs. Lynley Tensedge), Christopher MacDonald (Kent Mansley), John Mahoney (General Rogard), M. Emmet Walsh (Earl Stutz).
C-86m.

by John M. Miller