 Animated, Yes, But Not Cartoony
by Brad Cook "What if a gun had a soul?" Those words, spoken by The Iron Giant director Brad Bird (who also co-wrote the film with Tim McCanlies and Andy Brent Forrester), helped launch the current Warner Brothers animated film into production on a course markedly different from the one the project had been charting while in development. Based on the children's book by British poet laureate Ted Hughes, the film was originally pitched as a musical with Pete Townshend, who released a concept album based on the book called Iron Man in 1989. Bird, however, saw different potential in the story and didn't want to turn it into another animated extravaganza. "It's not aimed at kids specifically," he says during a break in sound mixing. "It's aimed at moviegoers. It's rated PG. We're not based on a super-well-known property. We don't have five Broadway songs. We don't have annoying celebrity sidekicks. We don't have a number of things that you're practically required by law to have if you're a big budget animated feature." Bird was able to circumvent the feature animation police by flying low under their radar with a project which wasn't given nearly as much resources as a film like this requires. With that limitation, however, came the freedom to make the kind of film he wanted to make: an animated feature which, as he says, " is a film first and animation second." While watching The Iron Giant, the viewer really gets the sense that, a few over-the-top moments aside, this is a film which could have been live action with computer generated elements. The year is 1957. As the Russian satellite Sputnik and its cosmonaut dog circle the globe and the United States and the Soviet Union lock horns in the Cold War, a mysterious meteor plummets toward Earth. The giant's appearance on the outskirts of a small Maine town stirs up rumors that perhaps the Russians or the Chinese have created a new weapon of destruction. The rumors attract the attention of a boy named Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal), who lives with his single mother (Jennifer Aniston). He ventures into the woods and comes across the giant. Raised on a steady diet of comic books and monster movies, he's thrilled to have his very own toy robot, even if it is 50 feet high. First he hides the giant in his mother's barn and then moves him to a junkyard owned by a beatnik named Dean (Harry Connick Jr.), the whole time trying to avoid an overzealous government agent (Christopher McDonald) who wants to destroy the giant in the name of national security. Along the way Hogarth teaches his new friend about life. "I would say the giant is the child and Hogarth is the father in many ways," Bird explains. "Hogarth is teaching the giant and, even though the giant has great powers, he's sort of not really aware of his own power. And that could also be - without getting too pretentious about it - our relationship with technology. I think our morality lags behind our understanding or our technical know how and we're constantly wrestling with the dark side of the things we basically create for other reasons." Mankind's relationship with technology is one of the themes of the film, with the other coming from Dean and then echoed by Hogarth to the giant: "You are who you choose to be." "I hoped to say something about our own moment by moment choice of what side of ourselves we're going to let out," Bird elaborates. "When I was writing that aspect of it I thought of Cary Grant and how he was born a lower class kid in England and he basically invented Cary Grant. By choosing to be Cary Grant, in pretty short order he was, and no one can tell me he wasn't. "The giant lands on Earth and doesn't know or remember where he came from or why he's here or where he's going, which I think is a pretty good way to sum up the position any conscious being is in." The Iron Giant actually manages to steal the show from his animated counterparts with his wonderful childlike quality. In one memorable scene, he tears up some train tracks for a snack and then tries to fix them as Hogarth frantically screams that a train is coming. The giant bends over on his knees and carefully re-aligns the tracks, engrossed in his task and oblivious to Hogarth. He looks like a little boy fixing his model train set and ignoring his mother. His voice, which was performed by Saving Private Ryan actor Vin Diesel and altered in post-production, has a deep, crunchy quality which gradually becomes more human-like as Hogarth teaches him to speak. All of the voice work in the film is exceptional, in fact. Aniston becomes Hogarth's harried mother so effortlessly that one never thinks about the fact that this is the same actress who portrays the whiny Rachel on Friends. "I think [the voice sessions] are always a shock for people who haven't worked in animation," Bird says, "because I think if you do it right, everything is there in the voice, whereas many actors who aren't accustomed to doing this work are used to using their hands and faces and bodies. I always look away when I'm recording people because I don't want to be seduced by what they're doing visually. "I think [the actors] did a fantastic job with the voices and the animators were tremendously inspired by their performances. I think you get much better performances from animators when they're excited about the quality of the voice work." One area where the animators excelled was in the computer generated work. Many recent animated films which rely on some CG elements unfortunately look very uneven because there is such a difference between the hand drawn and computer rendered art. Ironically, the goal in The Iron Giant was to make everything look hand drawn. "Rather than try to attempt and fail to get hand drawn animation to be as photo realistic as computer animation can be," Bird says, "we chose to try and make computer animation look more hand drawn. We actually worked very hard to force the computer to let in imperfections. We developed a program that wobbled the line a little bit, but not enough that you would notice." Does this constitute a revolution in the animation business? "Well, I don't know," he replies after a pause. "I think it's a small revolution. The word 'revolution' is kind of a large word, and I would say that if there's anything different about it I think it's more what the film is than how we got there." One of the delights of this movie is picking up the little details. Hogarth pulls out copies of Action Comics and MAD Magazine when he goes to the barn to read the giant a bed-time story. Dean has a Jack Kerouac poster on his wall and myriad books and jazz records line his bookshelves. Mansley, the government agent, turns around a goofy dog-faced potholder which looks like it's mocking him while his boss chews him out on the phone in Hogarth's kitchen. These little touches shouldn't come as a surprise when one learns that Bird once consulted for The Simpsons. With its attention to detail and variety of shots not normally seen in TV animation, he says the show was great schooling for his current work. However, while The Simpsons was a prime time hit and paved the way for more adult-oriented animated shows such as South Park, The PJs and Family Guy, the filmmaker still sees a lot of misunderstanding about the medium he loves so much. "Animation has been viewed as a genre, which I think is false," he explains. "It should be viewed as an art form with its own particular strengths and weaknesses. I think you can tell any story under the sun in animation if you play to animation's strengths." While it's part of a genre (science-fiction) which is often associated with animation, The Iron Giant is really a movie about relationships. Like E.T., it's a film about a boy who meets up with a wondrous creature from another world and teaches it what he knows about life while learning some lessons himself. With the Cold War looming in the background and the shadow of communism permeating every facet of the characters' lives, The Iron Giant serves as a fable about mankind's fear of what it doesn't understand and how those who are caught up in the madness don't have to be what others say they are. Even the giant has a choice between his latent malevolent form and the person he looks up to most after Hogarth: Superman. "It seems to me," Bird sums up before he has to get back to work, "that if the animation is produced on a high quality level, then the subject matter is usually very predictable and boring and pre-digested. If it's in any way an alternative sort of material, then it seems to be produced on the very lowest level of quality, and that bothers me. I think there's an audience out there for stuff that's both well-produced and different." Read the Mania Review of The Iron Giant!
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