Cartoon Corner- The Iron Giant

Originally posted at the DL December 2015

I feel like there's two movies here.  The core narrative of Hogarth and how he sparks the Giant's growth, and the story related by subtext and knowing the historical context of the setting (which is also the story of about 15 minutes of runtime riiight before the climax but anyways).  There's a lot of density here for this sort of film, but I'd probably blame that on Brad Bird.  But actually I feel like I missed huge chunks of the film the last time I went through it because there's a couple bits I don't actually remember.  Hogarth's rundown to Dean of his life in particular.  Sorta like "oh, they DO explain why the kid is so offbeat and likes hanging out with a beatnik, okay".



Okay, back to the two movie thing.  The trouble there is that the subtextual movie is a lot more interesting than the narrative one, because the film practically stops dead a lot of times just to have kid and his robot shenanigans.  Not that they're bad shenanigans but earlier bits of the movie put cues to keep you in the subtext plot while the middle parts are just shenanigans for their own sake.  A lot of them don't really contribute a lot to... well, Superman either, so it's just kinda... a thing that happens.

So subtext.  Okay, probably not the best word for it, although I'm not sure how else to describe it.  There's a very tangible sense through the whole movie that the adults are living their own 1950s lives and it's only sporadically intersecting with Hogarth's robot best buddy movie.  But the cues about Sputnik, the duck and cover video, the emphasis on the witnesses being working folk, on and on lets you as a viewer know what aspects of the half-seen adult life movie are influenced by the current events of the time period.  And from there you can fill in the parts you don't see from basic knowledge of history; what they worry about, what things are actually like, the gap between the two, the cultural undercurrents and early rumblings of later counter-culture shifts.  A whole other movie that's partly displayed in the movie, but can be completed easily but adding outside knowledge of the cultural context it's set in.

When you have both the movies side by side, I can kinda see why they wanted the shenanigans stuff, to try and emphasize that off-beat or not, Hogarth is a kid and has the naivete of one, and using that to set up why he's better equipped to figure out how the Giant works.  But even knowing why it's there, I don't think it quite works.  You get the same emotional/thematic beats from the meatier scenes like the train crash, or the deer.  Dragging out the walking hand bit or the trip to the lake... not so much.

I don't think there's anything so clever to say about the last bit of the movie.  The conflict with the army briefly shoves the second movie to the forefront.  Superman is Superman.  The sole advantage of being a WB Animation movie of the time period, they can bloody well call Superman Superman.  You are better than you think you are.  Er, who you choose to be.

Rating- 8/10.