Signature Edition

The Iron Giant Blu-ray Review

BigFellas

Reviewed by Michael Reuben, September 4, 2016

The runaway success of Disney's The Lion King in 1994 jump-started a boom in feature animation. Warner dubbed its new group "Warner Bros. Feature Animation", and like every other in-house division, it failed to replicate Disney's success in an era when animation was being redefined by the creative upstart known as Pixar. Warner's effort produced a single box office hit ( Space Jam ) and a string of flops that included Quest for Camelot and Osmosis Jones . It also produced an undeniable classic in The Iron Giant, which failed at the box office but became a family favorite on TV and home video. Meanwhile, Iron Giant's director, Brad Bird, was snapped up by Pixar, where he became the Oscar-winning creator of The Incredibles and Ratatouille In 2014, Bird and Warner began discussions on a new version of Iron Giant for which the director would complete several scenes that were initially cut for budgetary reasons. The result was released to theaters in the fall of 2015 as The Iron Giant, Signature Edition. After almost a year's delay to allow for the creation of a fascinating new documentary on the making of the film, Warner is now issuing The Iron Giant on Blu-ray. Both the theatrical cut and the Signature Edition are included on the same disc.The Iron Giant is freely adapted from The Iron Man, a children's sci-fi novel by Ted Hughes, who is better known as a British Poet Laureate and the husband of American poet Sylvia Plath. Bird and screenwriter Tim McCanlies ( Secondhand Lions ) shifted the locale from England to the U.S. and set the events in 1957, just after the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik had elevated Cold War tensions to a new height. Fear of space-based weapons lent new urgency to the "duck and cover" maneuvers in which school children were routinely drilled. The Iron Giant includes its own version of a short film shown in classrooms to assist in such drills.In this atmosphere of paranoia, a giant robot plunges from space into the ocean waters off the fictional town of Rockwell, Maine, where it terrifies a local fisherman named Earl Stutz (M. Emmet Walsh). No one believes Earl's tall tale of a space monster, but a nine-year-old boy, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), encounters the Giant in the woods one night and, after initially running in terror, ends up befriending the metal behemoth, who is suffering from mechanical amnesia caused by his crash landing. The Giant (voiced by Vin Diesel) quickly learns basic English from Hogarth, who also introduces his new friend to the world of comic book heroes, of whom Hogarth's favorite is Superman.Instinctively recognizing the need to conceal the Giant from adult eyes, Hogarth hides him at the scrap metal yard managed by Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), a beatnik and aspiring sculptor who is a regular at the diner where Hogarth's mother, Annie (Jennifer Aniston), works as a waitress. The junkyard proves to be an ideal location for the Giant, whose diet consists of metal and whose foraging for food has caused much unexplained destruction in the area. Reports of these incidents have attracted the attention of an officious government agent, Kent Manley (Christopher McDonald) from the Bureau of Unexplained Phenomena. Despite the skepticism of his superior, General Rogard (John Mahoney), Kent is convinced that a dire threat to national security lurks in Rockwell, and he quickly zeroes in on Hogarth's activities.The Iron Giant is both a comedy and an adventure, but the film's emotional core is the deepening relationship between Hogarth and his hulking new pal. As events unfold, Kent Manley's concern that the Giant might be a weapon turns out to be justified, but with his memory gone and Hogarth as his guide, the metal leviathan becomes a gentle and caring creature. An encounter with deer hunters introduces him to the concept of "death", which initially makes no sense to the alien machine, because he is capable of self-repair, but which Hogarth explains to him with a clarity and simplicity of which most adults would be incapable. Brad Bird's initial pitch for The Iron Giant consisted of a simple question: "What if a gun developed a soul?" Under Hogarth's tutelage, the Giant discovers the soul beneath his forbidding exterior, but his better nature is challenged when he is found by Manley and attacked with the full fury of General Rogard's military forces. Defensive reflexes trigger the Giant's original programming as a weapon of war, and the awesome power of the alien technology concealed inside him prompts an escalation of firepower from his human attackers. In the end, though, it is the Giant's devotion to Hogarth that rescues the town from destruction.The Signature Edition of The Iron Giant adds two new scenes. A short scene beginning at time mark 15:51 shows Dean and Hogarth's mother conversing in the diner, thereby deepening their characters and hinting at a possible future relationship. A more substantive addition occurs at time mark 54:46, when the Giant is "sleeping" in Dean's junkyard and experiences nightmarish flashbacks to his former life as a soldier in a mechanical army. His visions emerge as transmissions that are picked up on Dean's TV, who is startled by the violent images flashing across his screen. A further alteration occurs at time mark 29:18, when Hogarth is watching TV at home. In the theatrical cut, the commercial on the screen is for Maypo Cereal, but in the Signature Edition it has been replaced by an ad for Disney's Tomorrowland, which is what Bird originally intended but had to omit when Disney would not grant him a clearance. Today, with the Mouse House having acquired Pixar and wanting Bird to helm a sequel to The Incredibles, a clearance was the least it could do.