'The Iron Giant,' a 1950s masterpiece made in the 1990s, turns 25

Brad Bird’s animated Cold War parable was a flop in 1999 but has been beloved ever since.

The Iron Giant was a product of Warner Bros’ short-lived animation division and arrived at the end of a long and difficult production process. Based — very loosely, I gather — on a 1968 novel by Ted Hughes, the husband of Sylvia Plath, it was initially going to be a musical adaptation with songs by Pete Townshend. 

The directorial debut of Brad Bird — a longtime Steven Spielberg and The Simpsons hand who went on to direct Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille, plus the great Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol — The Iron Giant came out in August of 1999, 25 years ago this month.  

Arriving near the end of the era of hand-drawn animation, The Iron Giant became a box office flop that helped bring about the end of Warner Brothers Animation. However, shortly after its release, it became a cult hit and has been beloved by a small but vocal fanbase ever since. 

Set in 1957, around the time of the Sputnik launch, it’s a film about the iconography and politics of the height of the Cold War and Red Scare. It also approaches those things with a decidedly peacenik philosophy. There’s even a Beatnik character voiced by Harry Connick, Jr. 

Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal) is a 9-year-old boy living with his single mom (voiced by Jennifer Aniston) in 1950s Maine. He soon befriends the titular giant robot from space (voiced, sparingly, by an early-career Vin Diesel), and it’s essentially the plot of Spielberg’s E.T.: An alien comes to Earth, befriends a fatherless boy, and overzealous government agents soon take interest. The friendship between the boy and the alien leads to tears for almost everybody watching.