a gem
And here's Warner Brothers busting into Disney's turf with The Iron Giant. It's about time. Plus the WB gives the Mouse a definite run for the money with this cartoon movie.
The story is set in the paranoid Cold War time of 1957. Sputnik orbits the Earth and the giant robot crash lands off the Maine coast. It has amnesia and the boy (of course) finds him and teaches him the ways of Earth in order to do good.
People have glimpsed the iron giant and have called in a Fed to investigate. Imagine Mulder from The X-files only a complete and total asshole and you get the drift of where the investigator comes from. You can't keep a two hundred foot tall robot hidden forever, and that leads to the Big Finish. Which I won't give away, but man, it sure was similar to the ending of Kingdom Come , one of the all-time great graphic novels that I wish one day Warner Brothers would have the balls to turn into a movie. (I am not holding my breath. Given what a total screwup Batman & Robin was, plus Warner's obsession with casting the completely wrong Nicholas Cage as the new Superman, I do believe the world is safe from a Kingdom Come fiasco. Unfortunately.)
The quality of the animation is superb. Warner Brothers spared no expense. While you can tell it was computer genned as far as the robot and other objects are concerned, at least they are still rendered with the "flat" look of regular animation versus the 3D Toy Story look most computer rendered animation has.
The humans are drawn equally well. Their faces convey as many or more expressions that a real human could also do.
But the best character is the robot. Given his minimal range of actual movement capabilities, the scope of his awakening emotions was a wonder. The giant's animators deserve buku kudos for what they achieved. (The sequence of the robot's hand inside the house had someone on creative overdrive to achieve what they did.)
All is not perfect with The Iron Giant. There are plot holes (SPOILER WARNING) one could drive a truck thru. Plus the Fed paranormal investigator is such an over-the-top fascist. He'd've done Stalin proud.
Dispite a few gripes, The Iron Giant kicks ass. It's thoughtful, fun, and bittersweet--something Disney has a hard time achieving nowadays since the halcyon times of The Lion King are long gone. TIG can be enjoyed equally well by adults, so check it out before it dies at the box office. The movie deserves better than what is happening to it.
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