I’ve got to disagree with this thought. Alot of the reason that people go to see the latest Pixar flicks is to see how awsome the animation is. Yes the stories are pretty good, but not the best. But if Monsters Inc or Finding Nemo had the exact same stories but were animated ala Disney standards I’d bet cold hard cash that they would have made 50-60% of what the CGI box office takes were. The stories for most of the Pixar movies aren’t anything super special or original IMHO. Pixar just takes fairly cliche stories and cranks out good movies with them.
While I agree in part that Pixar films are technically stunning, and that is definitely a draw, their true success lies in how well written and acted they are (the two points tie together, Pixar’s great at making emotive and sympathetic critters appear on screen). Again, look at Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Wonderful animation, but it tanked! Why? The story sucked (actually, I like it, but I know I’m in the minority here). Also Ice Age. Decent animation, but that was a bog standard story, and it didn’t exactly set the world on fire. The Shrek and Pixar films have the advantage of being wonderfully well-written, and that’s what really sets them above “Brother Bear” and “Home on the Range”. That, and massive marketing.
Count me as one who loved “The Iron Giant” - tho my little daughter ran screaming upstairs when the giant died. I hope the original poster sees the whole thing; he’ll wind up rewatching, I bet.
And, yeah, the coming back to life at the end did cheapen it a bit, but not enough to ruin it for me. It’s a wonderful, wonderful film.
My take on TIG is this, there are two endings…
the “kid safe” ending; (the reconstruction sequence on the glacier) for young kids too young to deal with the harsh realities of life (when something dies, it’s gone, there is no “reset button”)
the “real” ending; Hogarth says “I miss him” and walks away from the statue, fade to black.
just my opinion
What do you mean you’re discouting anime? Anime just means animation from Japan. Who doesn’t consider Princess Mononoke to be anime?
I did too! Damn funny movie. I laughed my ass off from beginning to end at the theater.
You have a cold heart of stone. STONE!!
heh.
The funny thing is, I really don’t. Just about anything remotely sappy makes me cry: Kleenex commercials, Hallmark cards, etc.
I dunno, maybe it was an off day or something.
It just seemed like I saw the ending coming a mile off* and I just couldn’t get ‘into’ any of the characters enough to care.
*yeah, I know that it can be said of a LOT of movies.
IMO, The Iron Giant is only a good movie. What kept it from being a truely great movie was the heavy-handed, overly preachy anti-gun message. For the most part the film had a really great, timeless, mythical feel to it. But then it would suddenly and rather obviously degrade into the standard “guns are evil” and “EEEEERTH MAAAAAN BAAAAD” nonsense.
I feel you can tell an anti-war story, even one for kids, without resorting to such lazy, clichéd caricatures.
By the way, a pre-famous Vin Diesel was the voice of the giant…
From what I heard, at Comic-Con San Diego, a Warner Bros. executive (not involved with the Iron Giant fiasco) publicly apologized to Brad Bird for the screwup.
Seconded. I passed on the movie when it first came out, since I had no idea what it was like. Only upon later recommendation from my friends did I discover TENG is the closest we’d get to Walt Disney doing a Chuck Jones cartoon. 
IIRC, that ending was tossed in because the test audiences found the movie ended on a major bummer without it.
Gotta disagree with you about the Shrek movies there – while they are very funny, I find them to be rather shallow as well; too much of the humor comes from “cool” pop culture references, which are sure signs the movie is going to age poorly. The Pixar films don’t do this; their humor and warmth comes from within, not without.
Twenty years from now, people will still watch the Pixar stuff with pleasure; the Shrek movies will have too many embarassing moments of “Well, it was funny at the time…”
And you’d kivetch about it anyway, just because it had an anti-war message, I’d wager. 
I saw the movie on Cartoon Network this afternoon and there was one moment that really bothered me. Towards the end, when the army is going after the Giant, Dean tries to get them to hold off by saying that the Giant has Hogarth with him. Kent hears this, and turns around and tells the general that the Giant has killed Hogarth. I found this really shocking–Kent had clearly been willing to go to great lengths to find evidence that the robot existed and was dangerous, but he hadn’t actually made up any of that evidence until that moment. Or was it just a case of Kent hearing what he wanted to hear (“he’s got the kid” means “he killed the kid,” not “he’s carrying the kid with him”)?
Unfortunately, I can’t remember the exact wording of that sequence (I was watching and doing homework at the same time), so I’m not sure if Kent’s statement amounts to a miscommunication or a deliberate lie. Would anone care to clarify this for me?
That’s exactly my point. His character was already clearly a bad guy. They did not have to hammer in the point by making him a raving sociopath at the end!
My feeling has always been that Kent was a conniving little bastard who would do anything to get what he wanted. To him, any means justified his ends because it was all in the interests of “National Security”. I would have thought it out of character if he had not done something like that.
Fair enough - I know there are various taxonomies of anime; I’m just trying to distinguish it from the “giant robots fighting while saucer-eyed Lolitas in school uniforms with magic squirrels perched on their shoulders look on” stuff.
I liked TENG too. But seeing it from a box office POV, Disney’s animations have been going downhill since Lion King. It might not have been obvious at first. They had a lot of momentum going since the early 90’s.
I’m not sure that the movie really is particularly anti-gun. A running theme is that the giant has free will to choose what he will be, and that this is what distinguishes him from a gun. It’s very similar to the common pro-gun (for lack of a better term) argument about “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.
When the giant says “I am not a gun” the point is not that guns are bad, it’s that the giant doesn’t want to be a gun, and will instead choose what to do.
I basically agree. Remember, while Kent is a military guy and is bad, the general is a quite sympathetic and decent character.
The first scene with the hunters and the deer, however, does seem to be quite anti-hunting, although that’s not quite the same thing as being anti-gun.
Anyhow, it’s a frickin fantastic movie. I agree that the “happy” ending is a bit unnecessary, and I like MacTech’s analysis. Actually, the one part that I’m really not a fan of is the whole laxatives sequence… that just seems to lower the level of humor of the movie as a whole.
Odd that Hogarth would be against hunting when he himself has a BB gun…
Amazing, I figured I was the onl Doper stuck to the Cartoon Network on Saturday. The Iron Giant is one of our families must watch a thousand times movie, along with TENG, The Priccess Bride, and a few others. I confess to gettnig teared up at the ending too. Like Nurobath I would have found it out of character if he hadn’t done something outrageuos. Totally in character when you think of the whole “we’ll take you away from your Mom” speech.
Disney would stop losing money on it’s animation of they’d stop wasting resources on making really lame sequels to movies that don’t need sequels. Remember Alladin, a great film, show of hands for who’s seen the sequel?
I saw the first Alladin sequel (the one who’s selling point was that Robin Williams was Genie again). It wasn’t bad, but nowhere near as good as the original. On the other hand, it wasn’t even the worst movie, much less the worst sequel Disney ever made. However, there was a short time (like, say, '88-95) when “Disney Animation” was a phrase redolent with integrity. You just knew they would never cheapen their reputation with sequels or direct-to-video releases. Then they changed their minds and decided to go buck-mining, just like they did in the late 60’s and all through the 70’s. “Doomed to repeat themselves,” anyone?
Back to the OP, I’ve only seen the Iron Giant a few times, but I loved it. I loved it more than my kids did. Neither of them has wanted to see it a second time, so I actually had to watch it once when they weren’t around. I teared up at the “Superman” part every time.