The Iron Giant - Critique Analysis

Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant is set in 1957, when Cold War tensions were high and Sputnik was circling the Earth. However, it’s set in this time not to rehash the old fears of communists or the Soviet Union, but to contextual the fears of today and to act as a mirror of our times. The Iron Giant is a stand in for our modern fears of nonconformity, trigger-happy military policy, and ambiguous governmental power.

The Iron Giant uses a certain amount of melodrama and spectacle to help children identify the contradictions of the self-professed “protection” of the government and their role as the “bad guy” in the film. Hogarth repeats the phrase “guns kill” throughout the film in order to encourage the giant to be a good guy, yet the government’s first instinct is to turn to guns as a solution. The political message of anti-gun violence is strong, but in the name of promoting peace and thoughtful response (as opposed to reactionary lashing out) rather than an assault on the second amendment. After discovering that the giant is peaceful, Hogarth starts talking about taking him to experts, but then stops himself and remembers that “people always wig-out and start shooting when they see something big like you.” The film critiques how willing people are, and the government in particular, to turn to violence in the face of anything that doesn’t fit into their description of “normal.”

Hogarth is an outcast like the giant, bullied at school for skipping a grade and for “thinking he’s smarter than everyone else.” In his espresso-induced rant, Hogarth expresses his frustration with being viewed as a smart show-off when really all he does is the homework that his classmates don’t bother to do:

 

Not to mention that his single-mother family contradicts the American suburbia model of father, mother, and obedient children, adding to his feelings of not belonging. This combined with the vulgarly-happy atomic bomb instruction videos critiques the public school system of overly-patronizing children and ignoring their needs and social realities.

This outcast model applies to the giant, Hogarth, and Dean respectively, but in the giant’s case, he is a Christ-type outcast. His direct comparison to Superman in the movie also directly compares him to Christ as a savior, the misunderstood who came from another world (heaven, Krypton, etc.) in order to sacrifice his life to save others. Even though he physically resembles Hogarth’s comic book villain Atomo, Hogarth encourages him to be Superman, the hero who always uses his powers for good. The giant is also dies for the sins of the people he protects, especially for Kent who screams for the missile to be launched directly at the city. Kent believes in the philosophy that if “we didn’t build it and that’s reason enough to assume the worse and blow it to kingdom-come!” By making the giant a Christ figure, the film promotes charity and peace in opposition to violence and close-mindedness.

The Iron Giant is a children’s film that addresses serious themes of nonconformity, outcasts, and government policy in a non-patronizing way. It refrains from using musical numbers or even cutesy, anthropomorphic animation in order to encourage their young viewers to exercise their critical analysis and actively participate in the film’s dialogue between peace and violence, art and guns, and good and evil.