RE-RELEASE THOUGHTS - 'The Iron Giant'

It's the '90s animated feature that got away, but oh my, revenge is sweet! Yes sir, animation auteur Brad Bird has remastered The Iron Giant and directed two new scenes. Let me repeat: the re-release of The Iron Giant contains two newly-animated sequences that qualify as the first bits of mainstream American feature 2D animation since 2011's Winnie The Pooh. But we'll get to that.

Giant is the gem in Warner Brothers' brief slew of animated features including Quest For Camelot and Osmosis Jones (yuck and yuck). You know the story: boy befriends robot. Military wants robot destroyed. Boy saves robot. Well, vice-versa, actually. It's E.T. meets 1950s b-movies, plus sharp storytelling and stellar craftsmanship.

All of Brad Bird's trademarks are present: the pacing is energetic, the cinematography whizzes all around, and the character designs are exquisite caricatures [that often resemble Bird himself]. Oh, and retro '50s-'60s landscapes and gadgetry! Gotta have those, unless you're Ratatouille.

Brad Bird nostalgically introduces his new edition with rough animation, pencil tests, and a plea for audiences to put down their devices and see movies on the big screen. Looking around, I noticed many small kids in the audience who very likely had not seen the film before, and it was comforting to know their parents took them to an animated feature with class and assured direction.

Having only seen the panned-and-scanned VHS version, seeing it remastered in it's original 2.35:1 ratio was like seeing it for the first time again. I picked up on a marvelous detail this time around: the Giant has pupils. His eyes don't simply glow, but instead brighten toward the center, and with just two pupils and four straight eyelids he produces such a rich, subtle range of facial expressions.

And then there are the new scenes. They are, in fact, the two deleted animatics Brad Bird wished were in the original film, but were cut due to budget constraints. They were given to Duncan Studio, a Pasadena-based group that often does promotional animation for Disney and Illumination, and includes original Giant crew members. All the new character animation, backgrounds, and integrated CGI were completed in four months, and they mesh transparently with the rest of the film.

The first scene is real short, and essentially sets up Annie's and Dean's romance while bridging Hogarth's classroom scene to Dean taking a bitten tractor to his scrapyard. The second scene is where the meat is: the Giant falls to sleep contemplating death, and broadcasts a dream about his dark, militaristic origins on Dean's television. Instead of Kent's interrogation coming as a good tonal jolt, Bird instead sets up a sense of danger that establishes A) the entire second half's darker mood, and B) Dean's suspicion of the Giant.

I still find Dean's allegiance shift back in support of the Giant too abrupt. And there is one Lucas-esque change: while Hogarth ushers the Giant's hand out of the house, the television in the living room broadcasts an ad for Tomorrowland instead of the original commercial. It's a little unnecessary, but it won't ruin anyone's childhood, and if Brad Bird is okay with it then so am I. Bird and his crew poured their souls into this beautiful film the first time around, and they've done it again.