Literally in the first shot, The Iron Giant masterfully brings all these themes together. It’s no accident that science-fiction anxieties about extraterrestrial visitors or invaders arose in tandem with our own ambitions for breaking free of our planet’s gravity and atmosphere - or that fears of a war between worlds coincided with the Cold War and its technological proxy, the space race. Before setting out into the woods with a flashlight strapped to the barrel of his air rifle, Hogarth throws a sharp salute to his own reflection perhaps it is really his father he is saluting. The bomber jacket and helmet Hogarth dons for his mission are the same as the ones we see in the photo. The Iron Giant actually opens with a shot of Sputnik in orbit, mankind’s tentative first step into a larger universe - a universe from which something else comes hurtling toward Earth, as if in response to the audacity of our efforts to venture into the heavens. In Toy Story 2, Stinky Pete the Prospector bitterly blames Sputnik and the space race for the ascendancy of space-age toys over Western toys, in effect putting Woody and Buzz Lightyear’s rivalry from the first film in historical context. Disney’s Tarzan opened that same year, the last gasp of the exhausted 1990s Disney renaissance, but another animated film that year pointed forward to a coming decade of unparalleled brilliance: Toy Story 2 proved that Pixar was no one-hit wonder, setting the stage for Pixar’s future achievements - including Bird’s follow-up to The Iron Giant, The Incredibles.Ĭuriously, both Toy Story 2 and The Iron Giant are tied to the cultural and even technological world of the 1950s: the era of crooning cowboys, cheesy sci-fi, atom-bomb anxieties - and, oddly linking the two films, Sputnik, herald of the space age.

The iron giant film ted hughes