35 THINGS WE LEARNED FROM THE ‘IRON GIANT’ COMMENTARY

Film School Rejects presents 35 THINGS WE LEARNED FROM THE IRON GIANT COMMENTARY .  Here are three of my favorites…

One of the big questions Bird and Lynch faced was in how much they should reveal of the Giant early on. They wanted to keep the Giant interesting and grab the audience’s attention without giving away too much too early. This seems to always be a concern for filmmakers creating a story that involves an otherworldly creature. Some director’s just don’t even bother with subtlety.

As Bird and Markowski mention, the first time Hogarth runs into the Iron Giant is the most robotic the Giant is in the entire film. They wanted to gradually show the Giant picking up Hogarth’s mannerisms and acting more and more human as the story progressed. As mentioned later on in the scene when Hogarth confronts and talk to the Giant for the first time, the Giant learns these humanistic skills very quickly going from “pet to friend to hero” as Markowski says.

One of the things Bird is very proud of in The Iron Giant is how real his characters feel. He mentions the audience reacting audibly when Hogarth gets hit in the face with a branch and how that’s a very difficult thing to pull from the audience when you’re dealing with animated characters. Audiences are so used to Wile Coyote falling off cliffs they’ve become accustomed to animated characters being more malleable than real people. “If you defy gravity and later on need to feel danger in the film, you have a really hard time convincing the audience how to do that,” says Bird.