It starts with grief. Sometime in the 1990s, a director was supposed to be thinking his way out of a creative funk. All he could think about was his sister, Susan. A few years earlier, Susan was murdered. She was a victim of gun violence. The director thought a long time before anointing his words onto the paper in front of him: “What if a gun had a soul,” he wondered. “And it didn’t want to be a gun?”
This director was Brad Bird. If his name is not immediately familiar, you might know his renowned directorial work on Pixar’s animated films like The Incredibles and Ratatouille as well as television shows like King of the Hill and The Simpsons. But before his legacy was cemented as one of the creative masterminds behind Pixar’s success, Bird was an underdog creator at Warner Brothers. He pitched his latest film idea, which was loosely adapted from a 1968 novel by Ted Hughes. Bird called it “The Iron Giant” – a buddy adventure film taking place during the height of the Cold War between a young boy named Hogarth who stumbles upon a mysterious but gentle robot from outer space. But when the government learns of the robot's existence, Hogarth must protect his newfound friend from being taken away forever.
Today, it's a cult classic. But when it was first pitched by Bird, Warner Brothers pushed it aside. “The Iron Giant came at a time when hand-drawn animation was being overtaken by CG, and Warner Brothers was in the process of shutting down its division after the 1998 failure of Quest for Camelot,” Brad Bird recounted in an interview. There was also the stigma of exploring more mature themes in an animated film, a medium that was often thought as exclusively for children during the time. “For us to set it in 1957 and have it deal with things like the Cold War was definitely not considered the kind of things you do in an animated film.” Bird explained.
The film was set up for failure from the get-go. Brad Bird’s passion project was assigned to the hands of an understaffed and inexperienced team of artists. But what they lacked in experience, they made up in passion. The lack of studio oversight allowed them to challenge the limits of hand-drawn animations, working tirelessly over Norman Rockwell-inspired scenes of Maine forestry and suburbia. The effort was worth it. To much of everyone's surprise, the film scored well in its initial test screening. But when it came time to release the film, Warner Brothers’ poor marketing and skepticism had landed them a complete box office failure, only earning a third of its total production budget. It looked like it was the end of The Iron Giant.
Except it was not.
After the release of its remastered DVD version, the film has regained traction in recent years. Modern audiences are more accepting of mature themes in animation, having become more accustomed to the way Bird incorporates them in his most well-known projects, allowing them to become the subject of new film analysis and discussion. The rediscovery of The Iron Giant has sparked a critical conversation on the cost of war in a time of international unrest.
Today, our headlines are blood-soaked. We have become all too familiar with the language of war. It's easy to fear those who we have been trained to call our “enemies” by the media, who we are told are programmed for “evil” by their ethnic, geographic, or religious lifestyles. They are drawn up as uniform and robotic soldiers, carrying death on their shoulders.
But it's much harder to do that when photographs of insurmountable destruction and videos of the deceased are splattered across our social media feeds.
We fear the Iron Giant. We use what we don't fully understand as an excuse to draw arms against our fellow human beings. And when the trigger is pulled, we make a regrettable and irreversible decision. All are martyrs in war.
When I was young enough to watch The Iron Giant, I’d get asked all the time by grown-ups “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?” I remember it was cute to put on a missing-tooth smile and say “World peace!” Today, it’s gotten more difficult to answer the same way without mentally bracing myself for all the historical and political mental gymnastics that are used to justify conflict.
As we grow older, we begin to understand the deeply scarring realities of injustices and discord left behind by our predecessors. But perhaps what we need is to reclaim that childlike hope for peace and embrace it as a fundamental goal. Just like Hogarth and the Iron Giant, we can remind ourselves about the virtues of friendship and compassion and how they allow us to take the first steps toward creating a better world. An aspiration for peace is not just a naive dream–it’s a necessary ideal to strive for in order to ensure a brighter future for us all.
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