As with any movie season, several good films fell through the cracks that summer. I remember catching a film one Monday night; some cartoon movie I didn’t know that much about. I had a screening pass for it, and after mulling back-and-forth about going all the way across town to the theater where it was screening, I eventually took the trip. I had some idea what it was about: some sci-fi fantasy about a kid who befriends a gigantic robot. By the time the film was over, the audience, fully stocked with kids and adults, erupted in applause. Even though I was in my early twenties at the time, I enjoyed the hell out of it as well. As I walked back to my car, I wondered, "That didn’t seem bad. Why haven’t I heard much about it?"

Anyone who has followed the long, strange history of "The Iron Giant" knows exactly why this movie got flung out into the wild, unable to fend for itself. Warner Bros. optioned Pete Townsend’s 1989 musical "The Iron Man," based on British poet Ted Hughes’s 1968 short story of the same name. As the project developed into an animated feature in the mid-‘90s, the studio handed the reins over to former Disney animator Brad Bird, who moved from Turner Animation to Warner’s animated wing after Turner Entertainment merged with Time Warner. As far as animation goes, Bird (who previously co-wrote the script for the Steven Spielberg-produced "*batteries not included") had two notable, acclaimed things under the belt: directing the "Krusty Gets Busted" episode of "The Simpsons," still one of the best "Simpsons" episodes, and helming "Family Dog," an animated episode of Spielberg’s short-lived anthology show "Amazing Stories" about a hapless housepet. "Dog" was later spun off into a cancelled, critically reviled show Bird had no involvement with. (Spielberg and Tim Burton, serving as executive producers, were mostly responsible for that wreck.)

Bird immersed himself in the "Iron Man" mythology, bypassing Townsend’s adaptation altogether and going straight to the source. (Townsend, who received an executive-producer credit, reportedly wasn’t bitter about the diss: "Well, whatever, I got paid.") With help from screenwriter Tim McCanlies (who would go on to write and direct "Secondhand Lions"), Bird made some major tweaks to Hughes’s children story. Instead of 1960s England, the movie is set in 1950’s America–specifically, the aptly-titled Rockwell, Maine.