Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 4 June
The Iron Giant (Bird, 1999)
Apologies for the late arrival of this update. I’ve been interviewing a NZ/Aus director for a forthcoming NZ On Screen profile and we managed to talk for two hours without getting past 1977 – another appointment is required.
Today’s recommendation isn’t just from me, it’s also from the late Bill Gosden who I interviewed back in 2016 about the NZIFF Autumn Events festival he had just programmed. The Iron Giant is an adaptation of a 1968 Ted Hughes children’s book (which terrified me as a child) and it’s the debut film by Brad Bird who would go on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Pixar and one of the better Mission: Impossibles, Ghost Protocol.
This is what Bill said about The Iron Giant in that interview:
It’s a film that's never really had its due, particularly in New Zealand, I think. I can remember it had fabulous reviews when it came out in, what, ’99? But it just turned up at Readings one weekend and was gone the next weekend. And because I had read the reviews and love animation, I saw it and enjoyed it enormously and tried to persuade everybody I knew with children to take them. Well, children of a certain age, obviously. The film has mature themes to deal with.
It asks a few big questions about, you know, can a machine have a soul? And that implies certain questions about our own kind of human status as presumably soulful creatures. So, you know, there are big questions. Kids wonder about these things anyway. So to pretend that they don’t and that these themes are too grown up for kids is, I think, deluded, frankly. But the film is also a great action film, which sort of has it both ways, doesn’t it, in terms of its anti-gun message, because there’s certainly a lot of gunfire in the movie.
Bill talking off-the-cuff in complete coherent sentences in that annoying way that he had.
This was back in the days when RNZ had pivoted to video so we made a cut down version of that Rancho Notorious interview with some clips from the films, including Kurosawa’s Ran (which coincidentally has just been released once more1 in a new 4K restoration to celebrate its 40th anniversary).
I miss Bill.
Where to watch The Iron Giant
Aotearoa: Streaming on ThreeNow (free with ads)
Australia: Digital rental
Canada: Streaming on Crave or Starz
Ireland: Digital rental
India: Digital rental (Amazon only)
USA: Digital rental
UK: Digital rental
Not in New Zealand yet, I’m sorry.
Iron Giant probably makes it to my top ten animation movies...depends on the day I think. The New England autumn setting is so beautiful and perfect for the story, so many scenes have stuck in my head.
On a related note, Dan, did you catch Mark Hamill on 'Fresh Air' this week talking with such passion about animation voice acting? Turns out he loved it as a kid, so it made sense for it to become his main career (as opposed to just being a fallback as it's so often seen)
Thanks for the recommendation. I look forward to watching that. I didn’t realize a GOOD movie version existed. Incidentally, I used to look forward to the time of the year when I would introduce it to my class of 5-6 year olds. What a powerful story. And I always assumed that the modern Ironman movies were a ripoff version of the original book??? Is that correct?