Set shortly before the conquest of space, in the mid-1950s, The Iron Giant, released in 1999, takes up the theme of the Cold War to give it a mythological dimension. A nuclear missile launched on a small town symbolically baptized Rockwell is a reminder of a time when the fear of a possible apocalypse was very present in people’s heads.
Directed by Brad Bird, who also signed the films Ratatouille and The Incredibles at Pixar and worked briefly on The Simpsons, this animated feature freely adapts a children’s book by British poet Ted Hughes. The tone of the film is however hardly literary and is rather reminiscent of E.T., the extra-terrestrial, by Steven Spielberg.
Hogarth, a 9-year-old boy raised by his single mother, finds, saves and protects a giant robot that has fallen from the sky and educates it with his comic book collection. The scenario sins by a sometimes excessive sentimentality, but the quality of the animation, whether for the action scenes or the faces of the characters, corresponds so well to the story that this sentimentality becomes secondary.
Sophistication
Gifted with an insatiable appetite for all things steel and a remarkable dexterity in reuniting the scattered parts of his body, the metal giant emerges as an icon crafted to perfection. Although Brad Bird seems to have immersed himself, during the preparation of his film, in the Superman cartoons of the 1940s, as well as in the Japanese disaster films of the 1960s like Godzilla, The Iron Giant remains of great visual homogeneity. . It looks like an animated remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, by Robert Wise (1951).
An impression made even more tangible by the poster of Forbidden Planet (Forbidden Planet, Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956) that the young Hogarth hung on his wall, the advertisements copied on the model of those of the 1950s that he looks at television, or the cartoon of the Ministry of Defense, invented from scratch, where schoolchildren are explained what to do in the event of a nuclear accident.
Both stylized and detailed, classic and jazzy, The Iron Giant seems to take over from the animation studios of Disney or Warner who had their credits cut in the late 1950s. The music has the high quality of not not be syrupy and Brad Bird never falls into too easy nostalgia. This restraint and sophistication allow the Iron Giant to rise very high in the landscape of animated cinema. Public and critical failure on its theatrical release, revived by its passage on DVD, it is now a cult film.