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I love 2D animation. The Simpsons is one of my favorite shows and classic Disney movies like The Lion King and Cinderella still have that timeless magic. Growing up on Scooby-Doo and Alvin and the Chipmunks, there is something unique about the hand-drawn traditional animation that gets lost in today’s computer-manufactured CGI. While CGI is still emotionally and visually impressive (Toy Story 3 is my best film of the year so far), 2D animation will always hold a special place in my heart. So when I popped The Iron Giant into my Blu-Ray player, I was very excited to see a movie in the format that seems to be going the way of the silent films, at least on the big screen.

The Iron Giant takes place in the “I Like Ike”-era of 1957, somewhere off the coast of Maine. Hogarth Hughes (voiced by Eli Marienthal) is our central character – young, ingenious and brave. With a squeaky/spunky voice, just think of the never-say-never Cowgirl Jessie from Toy Story. Hogarth is a contrast to the other townsfolk, who are wrapped in Cold War paranoia. Highlighting the feeling of the times, Hogarth's school shows film reels such as the Duck-and-Cover tutorial, “Atomic Holocaust.” With his single mother (voiced by Jennifer Aniston) working the late-late shifts at the diner, Hogarth sneaks out one night to investigate a rumbling in the woods. To his amazement, he encounters a Godzilla-sized Iron Robot that looks as if it could have come straight from the midnight B-monster movies his mother warns him not to watch.

It turns out that the unknown is not always bad. The robot – a metaphor for foreign fear – is a smart, playful machine. The only problem is that he is taking giant bites out of the town’s metal roofs and cars for food. Hogarth hides the robot in a junkyard run by beatnik Dean (voiced by the undeniably cool Harry Connick Jr), but matters get complicated when the US military, led by the paranoid trigger happy Kent Mansely (Christopher McDonald), starts poking around.

When a movie can make you laugh, cry, and tense up all in 86 minutes, you know that it is powerful. And powerful it is. Upon release, The Iron Giant earned rave reviews (averaging an astounding 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) for its emotional impact and I could not agree more. Rarely outside of the magical realm of Disney and Pixar do animated movies carry genuine emotion, but this Warner Bros (one of the only majors who hasn’t tapped the revenue potential of animation) venture bottled it. Perhaps this is the case because it was directed and co-written by Pixar honcho Brad Bird.

Bird was given an unusual amount of freedom on the project due to the film being put on the developmental fast track, allowing the studio very little time for arguing. He turned the film from being a quasi-musical like Tommy with songs by Pete Townshend into a current kiddy DVD staple. Based off of the 1968 Ted Hughes novella, The Iron Giant marked Bird’s first feature film debut on his so-far spotless track record.

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