Some of the most effective cinema of all time is made for children. From Pixar's parent-child conflicts to The Secrets of NIMH, "difficult" material in these types of films is often conveyed through artistic shorthand. In turn, this coding creates rich internal mythos - timeless landscapes of morality and learning make classics out of children's cinema. (See The NeverEnding Story, which brings adults to tears, or the sad beauty of The Last Unicorn.) But perhaps one of the most well-regarded examples of this phenomenon is Brad Bird's 1999 animated masterpiece The Iron Giant. This tale of grief, responsibility, and autonomy is a powerful one, no matter how old you are -- and its history proves that the story was always meant to transcend age. Though the film initially failed financially, it quickly became one of Western animation's most beloved and culturally critical classics - as well as one of its most sensitive on the topic of grief.
RELATED: How 'The Iron Giant' Helped Me Find Superman
What Is 'The Iron Giant' About?
Almost immediately, The Iron Giant shows us that it takes place in a world of tension. Set during the Cold War - a very real, nonfictional conflict - the atmosphere of the film is one of uncertainty and mistrust. After a mysterious object (the Giant) crashes to Earth from outer space, the audience is immediately thrown into a scene of abject terror: A boat captain stuck in a storm mistakes the Giant's huge, glowing eyes for a lighthouse and the full, threatening weight of the being before us is clear. The boat sinks, sending him onto the rocks. Before we even meet our protagonist (a 9-year-old boy named Hogarth), we're forced to consider the Giant from the perspective of fear. Though the alien being will come to prove himself as a feeling entity, the story begins from a point of terror. We must work backward in order to see him for what he really is.
It's echoed in the scene when Hogarth (Eli Marienthal) first finds the Giant (Vin Diesel): Though at first, he runs away, Hogarth returns when he finds that the Giant needs help. They become friends, Hogarth guiding the Giant through his world, but it isn't long until the government's paranoia threatens to ruin that bond. The Giant is slowly pushed to the defensive over the course of the movie; in one heartbreaking scene, he almost accidentally kills Hogarth and eventually seems to give in to violence to combat the military. It's fascinating to watch the government portrayed this way in a children's film and the film's genuine perspective makes its climax one of the most effective moments in cinema. When the army activates a nuclear weapon, the Giant realizes his hulking physical stature does not define his heart. He intercepts the missile, seeming to die in the process, finally becoming the "Superman" Hogarth promised he could be. "You stay. I go," the Giant utters and hearts everywhere shatter. As it turns out, this bleeding has been at the center of the project before it was even a movie - all the way back to its first iteration.
Ted Hughes Wrote 'The Iron Giant' to Help His Children Grieve
When the poet Sylvia Plath died by suicide in 1963, she left behind two children. They'd been the product of a volatile relationship between Plath and another poet, Ted Hughes. Hughes had not been a perfect husband during the marriage, taking part in affairs and allegedly abusing Plath. (Tragically, the woman Hughes entered the affair with, German poet Assia Wevill, died in the same manner as Plath, along with her child.) Hughes was a writer, and so, following Plath's death, he attempted to produce work that might help his children through the death of their mother. The end result was The Iron Man: A Children's Story in Five Nights, a book whose plot closely mirrors that of Bird's film. The major difference between the science fiction book and the film, however, is that the movie stays closer to the "real" world.
While the threat in the movie is the American military, the threat in the book is a dragon-like creature from space. (In the book, it's called the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon.) It's almost unquestionable that the movie's approach is more effective - a bit funny, considering that it almost ended up as a Don Bluth feature. Originally conceived as an animated musical, Warner Brothers eventually gave the project to Bird after the Turner merge. Bird had previously read the book and was interested - with some changes. He wanted to shift the setting, add some characters, and re-focus the story on the boy and the Giant. He hadn't seen it as a musical, after all, but the story of a relationship, "I came back to Warner Bros., said I was interested in IG, but wanted to a go a different direction with it," Bird told Animation World Network in 2009. "Then I asked them: "What if a gun had a soul and didn't want to be a gun?" It was a haunting question that would spark a new classic - and, for many families, a new way to talk about death.
'Brad Bird Used 'The Iron Giant' to Explore Death and Loss - With Some Changes
As it turned out, Hughes wasn't the only person using The Iron Giant to explore grief. In 1989, Bird's sister Susan was murdered by her husband in an act of gun violence. They had been very close. "I wasn’t thinking consciously about it when I proposed the idea," Bird told IndieWire in 2019, "but my feelings about [gun violence] are in the film and it’s dedicated to her at the end. That was in many ways the hardest part I had to deal with." It's obvious upon a re-watch: One of the film's most prominent themes is self-determination. Though the Giant is seemingly made to destroy, he does not want to do it - he's a gun with a beating heart. When he flies into space, we grieve both for him and for those he leaves behind; a surprisingly mature view of loss. The Iron Giant truly is one of our best children's features about death. One scene, in particular, seems to demonstrate this best: When the Giant sees a pair of hunters shoot and kill a docile deer, Hogarth must explain what's happened: "It's dead," Hogarth says. The Giant doesn't understand. "Dead?" He tries to pick up its lifeless body with his massive hands. "They shot it," Hogarth says. "With that gun." Later, laying under the light of the stars, he tries again, explaining something that perhaps even he doesn't fully understand. "I know you feel bad about the deer," Hogarth says gently, "But it's not your fault. Things die. It's part of life. It's bad to kill. But it's not bad to die."
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