Screen Savers Movies » The Iron Giant http://screensaversmovies.com 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:54:42 +0000 en hourly 1 The Iron Giant (1999) http://screensaversmovies.com/the-iron-giant-1999 http://screensaversmovies.com/the-iron-giant-1999#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:01:01 +0000 John DiLeo http://screensaversmovies.com/?p=213 It’s rare for an animated film to have such a strong social context in recent history. The Iron Giant is a children’s film about the Cold War, and it deals explicitly with the fear of other, yet it does so without becoming a didactic finger-wagger. With humor and the emotional bonding between boy and giant, the points are made in the right way, through dramatic action and character development. It’s a comic-book style entertainment rooted to a very real, and nervous, time and sensibility. The movie has some satiric fun with the period by including two black-and-white sequences that scream the 1950s: scenes from a stiffly acted, science-fiction movie about a square-jawed scientist, his curvy nurse, and a hungry brain, that Hogarth watches on television; and a schoolroom educational short about how to survive “atomic holocaust.” Both scenes induce smiles for their innocent quaintness. Just because Rockwell, Maine is an idyllic America, with a sun-baked wharf and autumnal colors brightening the landscape, doesn’t mean that its citizens aren’t expecting invaders from Mars, or at least Russia.

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]]> http://screensaversmovies.com/the-iron-giant-1999/feed 0 The Iron Giant (1999): Animating the Cold War http://screensaversmovies.com/the-iron-giant-1999-animating-the-cold-war http://screensaversmovies.com/the-iron-giant-1999-animating-the-cold-war#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:43:59 +0000 John DiLeo http://screensaversmovies.com/the-iron-giant-1999-animating-the-cold-war/ It’s rare for an animated film to have such a strong social context in recent history. The Iron Giant is a children’s film about the Cold War, and it deals explicitly with the fear of other, yet it does so without becoming a didactic finger-wagger. With humor and the emotional bonding between boy and giant, the points are made in the right way, through dramatic action and character development. It’s a comic-book style entertainment rooted to a very real, and nervous, time and sensibility. The movie has some satiric fun with the period by including two black-and-white sequences that scream the 1950s: scenes from a stiffly acted, science-fiction movie about a square-jawed scientist, his curvy nurse, and a hungry brain, that Hogarth watches on television; and a schoolroom educational short about how to survive “atomic holocaust.” Both scenes induce smiles for their innocent quaintness. Just because Rockwell, Maine is an idyllic America, with a sun-baked wharf and autumnal colors brightening the landscape, doesn’t mean that its citizens aren’t expecting invaders from Mars, or at least Russia.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

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