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Anybody remember a Pete Townshend music video back in the 80s for a song titled “A Friend Is a Friend”? It featured a stop-motion robot gamboling around clay-and-plaster countryside while Pete crooned light-hearted lyrics like “be friendly, be friendly, yeah.” He had purchased the rights to The Iron Man, a children’s book by poet Ted Hughes (who was married to Sylvia Plath at the time of her death), and written an album that was to have been the basis for a rock opera based on the concept. That never reached fruition, but a decade later Pete did finally get around to producing The Iron Giant, an animated version of the story, for Warner Bros. And it’s worth the wait.
In 1957, while Sputnik sends its Marxist beeps down on the good ol’ U. S. of A. and Cold War paranoia is at fever pitch, a mechanical alien visitor lands near a little coastal town in Maine. Hungry from the trip, he goes looking for a ferrous snack, but has a minor electrical accident and gets knocked unconscious while chewing on a power substation (so much for “Rust Never Sleeps”). A young boy named Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marenthal, who plays Stifler’s little brother in American Pie) finds the robot and wakes him up, but he’s got a bump on -- rather, a dent in -- his head and a case of amnesia. Meanwhile a government agent gets word of strange sightings and huge bite-shaped marks in local farm machinery and comes snooping. It’s up to Hogarth and his beatnik junk-artist friend (Harry Connick, Jr.) to keep the giant safe until he can recuperate and remember why he made the trip in the first place. But they can’t keep a ten-story robot hidden forever, even in Maine, so the army eventually gets called in for a climax reminiscent of The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!.
Directed by Brad Bird, best known for episodes of “The Simpsons,” and scripted by Tim McCanlies, who previously did the smalltown milieu so well with Dancer, Texas Pop. 81, The Iron Giant is a sweet story full of Nifty Fifties cultural references for adults to enjoy while the kids get entranced by visual style that’s a welcome departure from Disney and their emulators. It’s more like the Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons for WB and MGM, with a little scary anime and Heavy Metal influence mixed in -- sort of Samurai Elmer Fudd. B
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