Cinema: The Iron King

A lonesome little boy, hyperactive and hyperimaginative. A big, scary monster who doesn’t know his own strength–especially the strength of his sweet soul. An uncomprehending world that would rather exercise its many itchy trigger fingers than try to understand that which is strange to it.

Been there? Done that? Well, sure. But Brad Bird, who directed The Iron Giant, and Tim McCanlies, who wrote this handsomely animated feature, have given it a special urgency by the simple expedient of setting it in exactly the right time and place. That would be 1957 in a small town in Maine. It’s a moment when cold war paranoia is at its height and isolated rural communities are the targets of choice for aliens in dozens of cheapo sci-fi epics.

Not that the movie is most significantly a satire of an essentially self-satirizing genre (though it is entirely hip in its cross-references). Rather, it uses the archetypes of its time to impart a certain moral and melodramatic force to its story. Its kid hero, Hogarth, is full of bounce and bravery; the car-gnawing, train-wrecking giant is enthusiastically educable in his genially klutzy way. But the largest fun lies in the other characters: jut-jawed Kent Mansley, the funny-dumb government agent who has bought into the whole duck-and-cover thing; Dean, the beatnik junk sculptor whose cool helps thwart Kent’s heat; Hogarth’s mother, an old-fashioned, benignly clueless sit-com mom. Together they create a smart live-and-let-live parable, full of glancing, acute observations on all kinds of big subjects–life, death, the military-industrial complex–that you can talk about with the kids for a long time to come.

–R.S.