The Iron Giant

Brad Bird’s 1999 film was his first feature, drawn from Ted Hughes’s 1968 children’s book. It reached Warner Bros through the musical concept album Pete Townshend released in 1989; Bird threw out the musical and Townshend stayed on as an executive producer. One technical decision governs how the film looks. The Giant was built as a computer model while everything else was drawn by hand, and whenever he shares a frame with drawn characters he was animated at twelve frames a second, deliberately slowed so the model would settle into the cadence of the drawings. Vin Diesel voices him and he barely speaks, pushing the weight onto line and sound. The commercial failure had a promotional side. Bird has said the studio printed a single poster for it, and executives had pressed for sidekick dogs and a present day setting. The 2015 cut released as the Signature Edition restores two passages Bird storyboarded but could not finish: a cafe scene between Annie and Dean, and the Giant’s dream, animated at Duncan Studio under his supervision. A good fit if you enjoy watching a computer character pulled down to hand drawn timing. Not for anyone expecting action from a giant robot: this is Maine in 1957, and the threat is manufactured by the federal agent chasing him.