The Iron Giant: Well Constructed Themes and Efficiency of Storytelling

can you guys cool yourselves a little i feel like we're pressing our luck here hey baby we are cool welcome to downtown coolsville population us i just want to say thank you all so much for the love and support you all have shown for me and my work in the last few weeks i'm sorry it's been so long since my last upload i've been dealing with a vast array of personal issues these last few months and making videos has just been pretty far from my mind but all the kind words i've received from you all has completely turned that around i'm going to do everything i can to keep making content that hopefully you all enjoy just know that you've all really made a difference in my life so now that i've let you all know how i feel let's talk about a movie shall we no when i think of childhood defining movies from my generation the first thing that comes to mind are movies like the lion king finding nemo or a bug's life pretty much anything made by pixar in the late 90s early 2000s but for me the movie that defined my childhood was definitely the iron giant released in 1999 it was met with tons of critical acclaim but it was actually a commercial failure which blows me away obviously i'm about to do a pretty deep dive into this film so please if you haven't seen this movie do yourself a favor and go watch it seriously i don't even care if you watch this video afterwards just go watch this movie but anyway without further ado let us begin [Music] so the movie opens with a peaceful scene of sputnik orbiting earth and the camera pans to show the moon and what appears to be a meteor but will we later find out to be the giant and this is the first thing i think the movie does so excellently we all later come to love this big friendly giant but this intro wants you to be terrified the only thing we learned from this intro is that the iron giant came from who knows where in outer space then we see the sailor when he thinks he's found the lighthouse and the iron giant turns to reveal his eyes and then the man crashes his boat good lord this is some imposing imagery for a character that ends up being just like well he's like a little kid little yeah and all this is done simply through visuals it's just some absolutely impeccable design i love it so now we cut to the intro for our main character hogarth hughes i really thought i wouldn't have much to say about this part because honestly not a whole lot happens but when i really sat down to think about it there's another very big compliment i want to give these writers the efficiency of storytelling throughout this whole movie is honestly incredible there's hardly any plot at all but we learned so much about these characters from the first few lines of dialogue we learned that hogarth is the type of kid who likes to bring home animals and he really cares about them he thinks of them as friends i wonder if that will have any meaning later we also learn that his mother is clearly overworked stressed out about money and tired of hogarth's antics but she also cares enough about him to entertain him we also learned that hogarth is capable of lying to keep himself out of trouble but now he meets dean and they overhear the man from the intro talking about seeing the iron giant and how he called the government about it again efficiency we learned that the government's been notified of the iron giant we learned that hogarth isn't afraid to go out searching for an invader from mars we learned that dean is a pretty decent guy and he's willing to help people he's never met before and we get set up for one of the i guess you could call themes of the movie but if we don't stick up for the kooks who will this isn't a major theme of the movie so i won't spend too much time with it but it is interesting that the only people who end up being right about what's going on are the ones that are being called crazy throughout the entire movie now we cut to hogarth talking to his mom on the phone being told that she's going to have to work late now we find out that hogarth is a rebellious child because he does exactly everything his mom tells him not to but he's also a human genius because i mean look at this how have i never done this before as far as the movie he's watching i tried really hard to see if there was any connection between it and this movie but as far as i can tell it's just a reference to some terrible b-movie from 1957. however it does show us that hogarth is fairly brave he doesn't seem scared of the movie even mocking it at times but this sets us up for what happens next when the tv signal goes out hogarth climbs up to the roof to see that the antenna has been bitten off he also notices the area around his house has been torn up hogarth says alien invaders and we see him prepare to go track down whatever caused all of this damage this is why i wanted to talk about how good the introduction was without all the information we got earlier i think i would be asking why is this kid dumb enough to go chasing after something that is big enough to take out his tv antenna and take a chunk out of a tractor but we already know why he's a rebellious curious kid that's ready for adventure and this could have just been chalked up as well he's a kid kids are dumb but it wasn't and we got some of that sweet sweet effort that i always love to see in scripts so hogarth goes out into the woods where he stumbles upon a power station and we get some more ominous imagery for the giant i just hope it's clear that the movie is doing an excellent job of setting him up to be something honestly kind of terrifying however this is where we first find out that the iron giant likes to eat metal which i mean yeah it's pretty dumb why would a robot have to eat but for me it doesn't come off as being too terrible just because it doesn't really affect the plot significantly i would have preferred some explanation but i really don't see it as a huge issue this does however facilitate a nice character moment for hogarth as we're seeing the iron giant is getting electrocuted hogarth runs away which i think most would agree is the smartest move but as it shows here and gets explored further later on hogarth hates suffering we'll talk more about it later but hogarth really is just a genuinely good-natured kid who wants to go on adventures and explore but he never wants anyone or anything to get hurt so seeing that the giant is suffering he runs back to the power station to save it he pulls the switch to turn off the power and saves the giant the thing that for all he knows will kill him the instant he's free but instead he passes out and hogarth's curiosity gets the better of him he goes to inspect the giant and eventually wakes up hogarth runs off and finds a car that he gets to stop and it just so happens to be his mom which yeah this is pretty bad too just the fact that the first car he sees happens to be his mom at the exact moment he needs it it's pretty contrived but at least we know that she was looking for him and it's not like it's impossible i just gotta be fair here at least we get another good character moment i'm sorry mom oh don't you ever do that to me again hogarth i was so scared i thought i'd lost you we get to see that as mom even though she just got done working overtime and had a terrifying moment thinking she lost her son she's still just happy to see that he's safe then we get this interaction stop it just just stop i'm not i'm not in the mood i know it's small but this does an excellent job of really making hogarth's mom seem like a real person who's just overworked stressed and tired after this it cuts to hogarth in school where he hears people talking about what happened to the boat in the intro he tells them that they're all wrong and he gets bullied into being quiet one kid even calls him poindexter which i don't even know what that means but i definitely think it's an insult we need to bring back now we get to see a safety video which along with being hilarious by itself is actually based off a real safety video from 1951 but this is also set up for a joke that doesn't land for another hour into the movie we can duck and cover and i seriously love these kinds of things yeah it's small and at the end of the day it really doesn't mean much but at least to me it feels like proof that the writer actually paid attention to what he was writing that he actually cared about the script but now we get to meet one of my favorite characters of all time kent mansley he so perfectly encapsulates a man with his head so far up his own ass that he can't see his own ego inferiority complex driving everyone around him crazy and the fact that he's voiced by shooter mcgavin just makes it so much better oh my god also i just gotta say that the bureau of unexplained phenomena has a pretty sweet seal and i love the attention to detail for something we see for maybe half a second when it comes to kent however we see right off the bat just how highly he thinks of himself the way he walks the way he talks it all works extremely well for the character they've created so kent clearly doesn't believe that anything strange happened at the power station he says he's got to get back to big places where big things happen until he finds there's a giant chunk missing from his car so now he's fully involved he knows something big is going on and he's ready to do whatever it takes to take care of it now it cuts to hogarth looking to find the giant again showing us more of his spirit as far as he knows he easily could have died the night before but as it was shown in the classroom scene he clearly can't stop thinking about the thing so he's not going to let something as measly as death stop him from figuring out what's going on so hogarth sets up a piece of metal and waits to take a picture of it while he's waiting he ends up falling asleep he wakes up to realize that the medal is gone and has been placed behind him by the giant obviously hogarth freaks out at this and tries to run away eventually runs into a tree and this is where we find out that the iron giant might not be the threat hogar thought he was as he sits down and mimics him and gives him the switch he used to save him this tells us that not only is the giant conscious he remembers stuff and understands that what hogarth did saved his life and this is where i think the movie goes from being pretty solid to something honestly very special we've had scene after scene hammering home the fact that the iron giant is something to be feared and within seconds it entirely flips that around and we get to see him for the lovable character that he is there's something about his design as well that makes him so threatening yet so easily lovable at the same time maybe i'm wrong but i really don't think there could be a redesign that would be more perfect for the character being portrayed this is where we also find out that he might have lost his memory from when he crashed on earth i'm going to go into more detail later but this is the setup for what is to me the most important and honestly most beautiful part of the movie but for now we get more character consistency from hogarth which those who have seen any of my previous videos know just how much i love that we know from the intro that hogarth loves to take in wild animals and even befriends them so it should come as no surprise at the moment he realizes the giant isn't a threat he's immediately trying to teach him how to speak and get to know him it's lovely stuff i'm gonna keep bringing this up throughout the video but again the efficiency just in this scene we get callbacks to old information we learn new information we get more support for one of the themes of the movie and we even get the setup for one of the hardest hitting lines in the movie oh no me go you stay no following moving on though as hogarth is walking home he comes across a train track which the iron giant decides to eat and at the same time a train starts approaching hogarth tells him he needs to put it back and the giant spends too long trying to get the tracks in exactly the right position and ends up getting hit i do have to point out some criticism here first one being why is there a train crossing sign here like it looks like the signs made to warn drivers but there's no road here i mean this isn't a big issue i would just say to take out the sign and make the sound of the train be what gives it away now when i first re-watched this i was really wondering why he would take so long putting the tracks together but after thinking about it for a while i realized that he really doesn't understand much of anything at this point he realized that hogarth wanted him to put the tracks back together but he wouldn't know that he needed to hurry he's really just trying to do a good job at what he knows his new friend wants and for me at least that realization not only made this scene make a lot more sense but kind of beautiful in a way anyway after the giant gets hit by the train we see him fall to the ground in pieces and we see that he has the ability to reconstruct himself however i do need to address some more criticism and these ones are are pretty bad we know that hogarth is very opposed to suffering this even gets hammered home in later scenes but here he's just witnessed a train crash and he seems a lot more concerned with getting away than he does with whether or not anyone was hurt or even killed this is frustrating because he's very consistent at every other point in the movie just not here and the second one is how on earth did they get away with this we hear the train conductor say so how does he not see exactly where this 50 foot tall giant was running off to did it not leave any tracks or anything i don't know i'm just not buying it moving on though we see kent has gone to inspect the train wreck and when he's told what happened he asks where he can get to a telephone this gets him sent to hogarth's house and in terms of comedy this is far and away my favorite sequence of the movie with hogarth's prayer the way he reacts to kent being at the door and the bathroom scene i mean comedy is pretty subjective whatever makes you laugh is what makes you laugh but even as an adult this sequence made my sides hurt from laughter also seeing this move brought me right back to middle school but during the sequence we also get to see kent trying to call the army to bring them in to take care of the giant and we get to see more of his inferiority complex and fragile ego it's very obvious he has a hard time handling embarrassment so being humiliated by the general for believing in a giant metal monster he has a bit of a breakdown he demands that a memo be distributed when he brings proof of the giant which is just perfect now we get to see kent figuring out who the bb gun he found earlier belonged to hong kong hogarth news it then cuts to hogarth going to hang out with the giant and he brings him some of his comic books just watching the scene knowing what happens later on is a real gut puncher but even without knowing this scene is still very important he compares the iron giant to superman and when he sets the comic down the giant sees the comic for atomo the metal menace this scene while short and simple is beautiful to me because this is the dichotomy the iron giant lives with it's cemented more later on but in spirit he wants to be like superman but he was built to be like atomo so it's up to him to choose which one will be man so much of this movie is just set up on top of setup i love it now hogarth and the giant end up going to the scrap yard so the giant can have something to eat when they do this we get to see the giant deal with these problems in the exact same way that i do but this is also where we get to really meet dean who in all honesty is the exact person i wish i had grown up to be he owns a junkyard and just makes art all day and drinks espresso late at night i mean this guy is the definition of cool man i can feel this video getting way too long as i write because we get another great setup here after hogarth drinks his espresso he starts going off at dean about how he gets bullied at school and all the kids think that he's a nerd even though he just does the homework dean gives him a line that for me at least ends up being the most important payoff of the movie he says you are who you choose to be i want to take a real quick tangent because i think what i'm about to say is very important when it comes to being critical of movies if you or anyone wants to break down a piece of media it's very important to be able to separate your feelings about the media and what is actually taking place within it i'm not saying every review or critique needs to be an in-depth breakdown of every single line of dialogue with a long list of reasons for why it's good or bad nor do they need to be a wishy-washy mess of interpretations and assumptions what i am saying is that it will be extremely beneficial to know where the objectivity ends and the subjectivity begins and vice versa the reason i bring this up is because i love this theme i truly believe the line you are who you choose to be is an important lesson it's a theme that works for me it resonates with me and it holds true to me but just because it's true that these things work for me doesn't mean it must be true for everyone else in fact it would be weird if it was so this is where i think it's important to also be objective i want you all to know how this movie makes me feel because it does hold true but i can't speak for everyone where i can at least argue for though is how well does the movie execute this theme because having a good theme and executing a theme well are two very important yet different things so how good of a job does this movie do at executing this theme well i have to say it does a damn near perfect job we see it time and time again dean is living a life as a struggling artist because that's what he wants hogarth defends the iron giant nearly to his death even after the giant nearly killed him because he knows that the giant is good at heart and can choose to be good and the giant well i'll be able to talk about this more later on but this theme is absolutely central to his character i mean he's a robot that was likely programmed to be a killing machine who loses his memory and is able to overcome that programming through nothing but his own will i hope i got my point across here that whether or not you agree with the fact that you're able to choose your own path whether or not this theme resonates with you it's hard to deny the fact that the movie portrays the theme excellently through its storytelling now we cut to hogarth finally getting home and he finds out that kent has rented their room and is living with them now kent is obviously very suspicious that hogarth knows something about the robot and hogarth's mom tells him he should take kent to town and show him the sights so hogarth takes kent to get ice cream and we see hogarth spike his ice cream with laxatives i have no idea why they would be selling laxatives at an ice cream shop but hey i wasn't around for the 50s so what do i know however we do get this rant from kent that shows to us that not only does he have all the problems i talked about but he's also paranoid and damn near insane he tells hogarth that everyone in washington is wide awake and worried but in the earlier scene when he calls the general he's sitting at home drinking whiskey and watching cartoons maybe it's just a coincidence but to me it feels very intentional because it very strongly implies that kent is just one of few that actually feels this paranoid also i love this line fun but who built it the russians the chinese martians canadians i don't care i am going to skip forward a bit here for the sake of time even though i do think these scenes are important to the movie as they help us get connected to the friendship between hogarth the giant and dean i just don't really have much to say so we skip to where kent finds the photograph of hogarth and the giant so he now has the physical evidence that general was asking for it then cuts back to hogarth and the giant in the woods where they hear a gunshot in this scene we get something that describes perfectly what i was talking about earlier i'm not a gun nut by any means but i'm not anti-guns and i'm certainly not against legally hunting but like i said whether or not i agree with this message has no bearing on whether or not it's well executed so how well is this theme constructed well i'd have to say it's extremely well done too even though it's not nearly as central to the story it's still perfectly in line with what we know about hogarth and his disdain for all suffering and it's still relevant to the payoff of the movie so as much as i really don't agree with the whole guns kill and all killing is bad regardless of context message i can't fault the writers because i think they handled it excellently this is also where we first get to see the iron giant slip into his pre-programmed nature in reaction to the gun we then cut from that scene to another excellent scene hogarth and the giant are hanging out late at night and we can see that the giant is still distraught overseeing the dead deer hogarth comes to comfort the giant and i just want to take a moment to appreciate how beautiful this is what we have here is a giant robot that was made to be a weapon that lost his memory and is now experiencing sadness for likely the first time that at least he can remember and he's now being taught the nature of death by a little kid that became his best friend just by chance i just love this sappy crap so much i just can't get over how awesome it is for me to watch this little kid explain to a robot that he may or may not die one day but since he has feelings then he must have a soul and that soul will live on forever i'm really not a religious person at all but i'll be damned if that didn't have me choking up now we get this great juxtaposition where it cuts from the giant going to sleep thinking about how his soul will never die to hogarth essentially being taken hostage and interrogated by kent and this is where they truly make kenton to a real villain we already knew he was kind of a giant piece of garbage but now he takes a kid hostage interrogates him threatens to get him taken away from his mom and then knocks him out my goodness what a tourney took the thing is though as extreme as this is it's really not out of left field i mean we have seen upon scene showing that he's damn near insane and that'll do anything and everything in the name of national security or personal glory or however you want to interpret it in the next scene we see that kent is called in the army and he tells hogarth that the army will arrive in the morning i'm not sure why kent decides not to go to the junkyard now and wait until the army arrives maybe he doesn't want to give it away to the giant that people are coming i'm really just not sure but either way he decides to sit and watch hogarth sleep until the morning in order to keep him from warning dean kent does eventually fall asleep however and it gives hoggarth the ability to sneak out and warn dean so in the morning the army arrives and they ride out to see the giant we see that dean is cool calm and collected when they arrive so it's pretty obvious they have something planned in order to get out of it we then see that dean has set up the giant to look like a piece of art which i mean is fine but afterward the general tears kent a new one talking about how much tax money they wasted by coming out there and i'm just wondering why they didn't take any time to like at least inspect the giant like you already came all this way you're just gonna take one look and call it good now we cut to hogarth and the giant hanging out and playing and man this really bothers me i mean i get that he's a kid and kids are kind of dumb but you just had the army at your front door would you not want to lay low for like at least a day however this is a very pivotal scene in the movie so i'll try not to weigh it down with such trivial things as logic this is where we first see the giant make the choice that he wants to be a good guy hogarth is playing with him and he wants him to be atomo but the giant says he's not atomo he's superman but immediately after this hogarth shoots at him with his toy gun and we see the giant's programming kick in and he reacts to it this causes him to nearly kill hogarth but when he comes back he clearly doesn't remember doing it so when hogarth tries to shoot at him again he goes back into his defensive mode but before he can kill him dean is able to save him when the giant finds them dean yells at him to get back he tells hogarth that the giant is just a big gun that walks the giant clearly doesn't remember doing anything and we get some dialogue that really breaks my heart big gun that walks and when he finally realizes what he did we see him run away this is seriously some gut-wrenching stuff for a kid's movie the giant just wants to be a good person and he truly is but his nature is to be a weapon that's what he was programmed to do he nearly killed his own best friend and he doesn't even remember doing it it's hard for me to believe just how emotional i can get over a robot that can barely even talk after hogarth runs off to catch up with him we see that dean realizes that the giant was only reacting defensively to the gun now the movie cuts to some kids on a balcony who spot the giant through their binoculars and while they're looking at him the railing they're leaning against breaks and they barely catch themselves it then shows the giant hearing the kids scream for help and i love this part as well the giant is in the midst of realizing that his whole existence is for sinister purposes but he still wants to help and he acts quickly like it's not even a thought to him he just knows he should do what's right so the giant runs over and catches the kids just in time i don't know how them landing on metal is any better than the ground but i mean it's the thought that counts right now there are a bunch of townspeople that were gathered around and at first they seem afraid but after they process what happened they realized that he really is friendly which makes what happens next just so much worse kent spots the giant in the city and immediately yells that the giant is attacking the town and they need to stop it especially since we know he only reacts defensively everything they do to try and stop the giant only makes things worse so now dean tells kent that he needs to stop the shooting because not only does the giant react defensively but he also has hogarth with him so what megalomaniac can't decide to do well he tells the general this he says the monsters killed a kid sir we must stop it at all costs what an [ __ ] but this does a great job of cementing the idea that kent was never worried about national security all he ever wanted was the personal glory of being the one that found and stopped this metal monster he really only cares about himself we now see the giant running off with hogarth in his hand and he narrowly misses a school bus causing him to trip and slide off a cliff this is where we learn that the giant can also fly which is you know pretty awesome but as convenient as may seem it really doesn't come out of nowhere i don't know about you guys but when i was re-watching this i had definitely forgotten about the fact that he came from outer space of course he can fly i was actually ready to criticize this before i realized how much of an idiot i am for not realizing this was set up from the very first scene of the movie and he very clearly has built-in defensive mechanisms so the fact that he's able to fly without knowing he's able to fly is honestly pretty clever i really like that they went out of their way to show the blinking lights as well to kind of make sure we understand that this really isn't some insane deus ex machina another thing about this scene that i feel does a great job is we get this very brief moment of relaxation with triumphant music and peace only to have us sucked right back into the action with the planes flying by this is also where we get to see the giant making the conscious decision to break his programming and not try to fight back against the planes and again we get a few brief moments of serenity after we think he's escaped planes just for him to get shot down i also love that as he's falling the giant's first instinct is to protect hogarth and as beautiful as that is there's no way hogar survived all of that i hate to say it but i mean come on ignoring that for now we do have a beautiful scene in coming so the giant wakes up after his fall and his immediate first thought is to look for hogarth where he finds him unconscious however the giant thinks he's dead and we get to see something that resonates with me so hard i was nearly crying when i watch this again the reason i think this hits me so hard is because for anyone who's gone through painful tragedy or loss like this it feels so real so relatable when you lose someone close to you there may be no real way to express the rage and grief that you're feeling compound this with the fact that the giant literally learned what feelings were a day ago and the fact that this was caused by the people that are actively trying to harm him it's no surprise that he falls back on his base instincts and wants to get revenge for what they did to him they took away his best friend just because he looks like a threat he didn't do anything wrong they hate him just for existing and hogarth was kind of like his moral compass and they took that away from him so he reacted in the only way he knew how it's just ah it's so well done i could talk about it for hours i swear but now we get to see the giant's true destructive potential it's really interesting to me to watch how this unfolds because we realize this is what he was truly sent here to do he was sent to earth to be like atomo not like superman that's something he fought to overcome and he had at least until the one thing he loved the most was taken away from him so now we see the army running away and annie and dean find hogarth and dean becomes a doctor for a few moments to let us know that hogarth isn't dead he's just unconscious so they decide to take him to a hospital this is where it cuts to kent convincing the general that they need to try using the nuke to stop the giant which to me is pretty perfect his megalomania has dissolved to the point where he is willing to nuke an american city in order to protect america even when he's given evidence that the giant is only responding in self-defense he doesn't care he wants to be the hero he wants the recognition he wants the memos distributed so everyone knows he's the one that saved america now we get what i believe to be the most powerful scene in the movie as he's being driven to the hospital hogarth wakes up he says they need to go help the giant and this is when they see the destruction he's been causing pogarth manages to sneak past the soldiers and run to stop the giant the scene seriously kills me he doesn't care that the giant has become a raging death machine slaughtering everything in its path hogarth knows who the giant truly is he knows that he can stop him even if it means staring down the barrel of some giant alien weaponry he doesn't care because the giant is his friend he loves him and he wants to help him god it makes me want to cry it also helps that this imagery of the giant towering over hogarth with him staring down the barrel of his gun and the red sunset sky in the background it's unbelievably striking to me and now we get the culmination of all that setup i was discussing earlier the two big themes of this movie all come to a head in this tiny bit of dialogue guns kill and you don't have to be a gun you are what you choose to be you choose and i really don't believe it could have been any more perfect the detail that i absolutely adore as well is that after this line when the giant turns back to normal his dent is gone the storytellers are making it abundantly clear that this is his decision this is not some reversion back to his amnesia state when he was essentially a child no this is the iron giant knowing everything about who he is and what he was made to do and still making the choice to be well [Music] i hope it makes sense as well what i was talking about earlier with how whether or not these themes resonate with you personally it's hard to deny the fact that they are well executed within the story they always remain relevant and they're never contradicted as far as i can tell and to me that just comes off as some very clean and tight writing now we get the exchange where dean convinces the general that the giant is friendly but it ends up with one of the dumbest decisions i've ever seen i'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt here though because well i'm biased and a terrible critic but also because kent's sole motivation throughout this entire movie has been being the one to destroy the giant so i don't know it just doesn't seem too out of character for him to do something like this without thinking maybe i'm giving too much credit though who knows however the missile is launched and is headed straight for the town the whole town gathers together as they prepare to die when hogar sees the missile he tells the giant that when the missile strikes everyone will die but as i'm sure you know the giant takes this opportunity to be the hero you always wanted to be he came to earth as a weapon something made for destruction but because of his relationship with this kid the love he has for his friend who taught him everything he's not only no longer a weapon of mass destruction he's also willing to sacrifice himself to save the ones he loves and if that along with this beautiful [Music] callback doesn't get your heart pumping i don't know what to tell you you might be dead now i know i already spoiled this a few minutes ago but the look of satisfaction on the giant's face when he calls himself superman is so perfect to me this is the moment where he truly is able to be who he chooses to be he's not whatever he was programmed to be he's the hero that he always wanted to be and this is what i'm talking about when i praise this movie for its efficiency and storytelling we got scene after scene of setup and theming and it all culminates into like four lines of dialogue in this very short but impactful scene and this is the kind of writing that i really appreciate every scene in this movie serves a purpose unlike this video this movie doesn't waste your time it just feels very obvious to me that the writers had a goal in mind while they were writing and they likely worked very hard to make sure that each part of the movie worked toward that goal like i said efficiency it cuts back to the people down below and we see the whole town watching the explosion but hogarth has his head buried in his hands because he can't bear to look it's just a wonderful little detail along with the whole town cheering and clapping while hoggarth is just hugging his mother because yeah he was able to survive but at the cost of his best friend it's a beautiful mix of tragedy and relief that you just don't get to see too often in kids movies now i have to be entirely honest here as much as i absolutely adore this movie i seriously wish it would have ended with this scene right here where hogarth is given the only piece of the giant that was recovered because while i understand that this is a kids movie and happy endings are sort of kind of a requirement it just really lessens a lot of the impact of the giant sacrifice when we get complete confirmation that he survived i wouldn't even mind it if it ended with the screw rolling away because at least there's still some ambiguity there but i don't know i'm just not a fan of the fact that we get a hundred percent confirmation that the giant survived in the end nevertheless that does bring us to the end of the film and my god what a film it was these writers gave us a story that was gripping funny beautiful and heart-wrenching all in less than an hour and a half they seriously did everything they could with the time they had and they deserved so much praise for it the voice actors all did excellent jobs at portraying the emotions of the characters especially hogarth for being voice acted by a 13 year old kid i am blown away i'd have to say the animation feels either average or slightly below average even for the time but what that doesn't take away from is the excellent cinematography this film had seriously so many of the shots in this film are stunning this movie is just jam-packed with striking imagery now it's numbers time i always say how much i hate numbers and here is a perfect example of why as much as i've been gushing about this film so much of that comes from the emotional side of me but if i were to be completely honest with myself and all of you watching i struggle to give it anything higher than a 7 at least in terms of writing and i know this sounds completely contradictory to pretty much everything i've said in this video but this movie really does have some glaring flaws in the script the train scene likely being the biggest one but there really are plenty more like how the giant was able to steal kent's car right out from under him but he doesn't make any sound loud enough for him to hear the giant's height also fluctuates quite a bit and the army coming all the way out to the town and not even taking the time to inspect the giant i don't know call me nitpicky call me whatever you want but for me at least even despite all those flaws the writers got things right where it truly counted the most and they did a good enough job to smash it out of the park for me emotionally well that should just about wrap up my review thank you so much for making it this far now if you'll indulge me i just need to plug a few things first thing one of my best friends who's been my biggest support in making this channel streams hunt showdown on twitch please if you enjoy my content go support him because my channel wouldn't be the same without him they also released a song recently on youtube the link is in the description in the description as well are the links to my twitter and my newly created discord please go check them out if that interests you at all i always love getting to chat with the community that's building here and lastly my patreon is in the description as well i really don't want anyone to feel like they have to donate but if you really enjoy my stuff and you want to see me make content more regularly that would be the best way to do that thanks again for making it all the way to the end i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you again next time you know this sort of thing is why it's so important to really chew your food

Channel: MakeBetterMedia

Views: 133,125

Keywords: critique, analysis, movie, review, the, iron, giant, the iron giant, themes, efficiency, story, storytelling, criticism, praise, love, idk, lets go

Id: g9liNMy9PVo

Length: 31min 34sec (1894 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021