The Iron Giant

WARNER BROS.

IN 2000 WHEN I proposed that the New York Film Critics Circle initiate an award for Best Animated Film, I had an agenda: Brad Bird's The Iron Giant. The animated film version of the Ted Hughes children's book stood apart from the Disney animation by reviving the quaint richness of post-war advertising and magazine graphics to tell a fantastic and dangerous story (a boy befriends a robot from outer space, alarming the town's adult conformists). Bird's drawing and narrative swiftness overturned preconceived notions of illustration and cartoon animation-it looked great in a dramatic new way.

Happily, the Circle ratified my proposal; unhappily that year's prize went to South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, which was essentially cable tv-a string of Broadway song parodies and bathroom jokes visualized with deliberately crude (faux hip) animation technique. I wondered if the award category was a mistake. Would Brad Bird's splendid talent ever get its due?

The new revised DVD of The Iron Giant does Bird's film justice. Although this re-release coincides with the acclaim for Bird's follow-up feature The Incredibles, the additional attention to this overlooked film helps to build its landmark status. Bird's Giant has a unique quality separate from Hughes' book. Bird's imaginative blend of nostalgic graphic style with a childhood morality has a classical effect (maybe that's why the Circle voted it second place) but his technique is, essentially, new. Bird's understanding of cartoon mythology is sensitive rather than childlike, subversive or satirical. His images evoke spatial and chromatic wonder-the peculiar closeness/distance animation has from photorealism-in the midst of efficient storytelling.

The Iron Giant has visual poetry on top of its already poetic concept. Bird's new blockbuster, The Incredibles, confirms his gift for beauty and his intricate, witty knowledge of cartoon tropes and media lore. But The Iron Giant elevates cartoon-making to art-making, while The Incredibles is more of a pop thing-like an entire feature done in the style of the old James Bond credit sequences. Verve holds it together (patchy moments outdone by the sheer brilliance of its best moments), whereas The Iron Giant is held together by feeling. As Brad Bird continues to enrich animation as a genre, it will be a challenge for screenwriters and novelists to keep up. Are cartoons and storybooks the only American mythology left for an artist like Bird to mine? He's a visionary to watch.