"The Iron Giant" - Your Future Belongs to You

It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s a giant iron man landing on Maine in 1957? Despite it appearing to be a kids’ animated E.T but with the alien lifeform replaced with a robot, director Brad Bird’s 1999 classic, “The Iron Giant,” is much more complex than it lets on. As both a fairy-inspired adventure and a superhero origin story, the film offers a little something for everyone. The younger audience is drawn to friendship between a boy and a giant robot while the adults are drawn to the film’s take on complicated and controversial ideas like gun-violence and nihilism. The film’s masterful writing transcends its initially mediocre box office results, garnering “The Iron Giant” a cult following over twenty years after its release. 

Being set in the ominous age of the space race that followed the second World War, “The Iron Giant[‘s]” inclusion of Sputnik in its opening shot accordingly sets in stone the tension of its setting. With North Korea’s recent advancements in nuclear technologies, the fears present in the film’s setting are entering the limelight of popular media once again. It is as if we are returning to the long-passed space race where anxieties about one’s future safety outweigh one’s options in life. Despite the film’s bleak backdrop, however, “The Iron Giant” presents a hopeful message about learning to choose your own path in spite of the world's predicaments.

Now tell me, if you were attacked by a colossal metal golem while at sea, how would you react? Not with joy and laughter, I’d hope. Well, that’s pretty much how “The Iron Giant[‘s]” characters chose to react to this conundrum. The very first scene of the film showcasing the giant’s crash onto Earth and his subsequent attack on the nearby fisherman establishes a menacing tone that is quickly betrayed. Rather than maintaining the foreboding tone from the introduction, “The Iron Giant” opts for more lightheartedness with the locals denouncing the robot’s assault as a drunken hallucination followed by scenes of nine-year-old Hogarth Hughes chasing his pet squirrel around. Even though one single Hydrogen bomb can wipe out their entire town and all of the humans living in it, the residents live without a care in the world, none for the looming Russian satellite and none for the giant robot who had just landed. The town’s locals didn’t break down crying from either the news of Sputnik’s launch or the robot’s crash, they simply chose to continue their everyday lives. “The Iron Giant” clearly displays its desire for its viewers to shape their own futures even if life becomes difficult, even if that difficulty is our imminent march toward mortality’s end.

Unlike my so far “plot-heavy” review and the film’s lack of a protagonist for its opening act would suggest, the core arguments of both will be explored through characters. “The Iron Giant[’s]” core theme of “you are who you choose to be” is explored primarily through its two central characters, Hogarth and the giant robot.

Plagued with the Red Scare, kids as well as adults of the fifties would dare not to approach strangers let alone a mysterious entity gnawing away at his home’s metal objects. The fearless Hogarth, however, immediately grabs the rifle in his house to investigate the cause of the disturbances. The young boy ignores the red flags raised by the suspicious happenings near his house and tracks down the creature that has been terrorizing his home. Instead of naivety, “The Iron Giant” treats Hogarth’s sudden outburst of conviction and curiosity as both a lust for adventures and a desire to secure his home(land). This drive for good is further displayed when Hogarth risks his life to turn off the power plant’s master switch, saving the iron man from electrocution. Unlike the conservative residents of old who wouldn’t go past being exclusive, our hero charges into the unknown fray to protect his family. Unlike the close-minded individuals of the past who judge people based on nationality, the open-minded Hogarth seeks understanding with foreigners before deciding on trusting them. Rather than disregarding the giant as an entity of evil because of his extraterrestrial status as dictated by society of the time, Hogarth chooses to live his own life and make his own decisions. 

Remember my introduction sentence equating the giant to Superman? Well that’s because “The Iron Giant” wears its influence on its sleeve. Literally. When Hogarth shows his machine friend the Superman comic books and compares the two aliens’ similar upbringings, the audience finally understands why the first half of this film has hit so many of the same beats as an origin story for a superhero. Both the iron giant and the man of steel are alien beings with immense destructive capabilities who crash landed on Earth. With the aforementioned electrocution having erased his memories, the robot gets to start a new life free from his birthright, much like baby Clark Kent. Much like many of today’s youths, myself included, the giant seeks some greater purpose for his life, one beyond just staying alive. So when Hogarth tells him that he is a hero like Superman and that he should “only [use] his powers for good, never for evil,” the giant decides to become a hero for Maine. Even when he learns of his real purpose as a weapon for mass destruction, the giant risks revealing his existence to save the town’s kids from falling to their deaths because he’s a hero. Even when the human government sends a nuke toward the town to kill him, the giant sacrifices his life, in what is one of the most emotional scenes from a superhero film of all time, for the sake of humanity because he is “Superman.” Just as the iron man is able to overcome his destiny as a devastating weapon for evil to become a champion of justice, “The Iron Giant” sincerely wishes that its audience conquer the boundaries in their way to achieve their dreams, whatever they may be, because “you are who you choose to be.

“The Iron Giant” being an animated medium is, in itself, representative of its main message about deciding your own path regardless of the world, paralleling its characters. Hogarth chooses to look beyond the general stigma that was so prevalent in the time period and accepts the robot as his friend. The iron giant chooses to reject his destiny as a ruthless instrument of death and offers his life for the sake of humanity. The film chooses to convey its complex ideas about violence and mortality through the lense of an animated movie, a medium universally perceived, at the time, as being a thing for kids.

In our modern world, humans are forced to deal with countless social issues, economical setbacks, and unreachable expectations, we become clouded by the problems in front of us and evolve ourselves to deal with them. In a lot of cases, this cloudiness is so great that people can lose sight of their dreams to fit in with society, forgetting about the most important problem being our limited time on this planet. In our modern world where the line between life and death is drawn by the simple action of pulling a trigger, “The Iron Giant” proudly embraces the inevitability of death as we ought to make the most of our lives while we can still live. Regardless of our grand ambitions or ordinary wishes, people should try to fulfill their dreams, not the ones made for them by family, not the ones set for them by society, but the ones they made for themselves.

 More than a mere cartoon about a human boy and his alien robot friend, “The Iron Giant” cherishes the concept of life. I wholeheartedly recommend this film to everyone, whether you are lacking a purpose to live or merely running out of things to view, because it will undoubtedly inspire you to chase your own dreams.