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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