The film transplants Hughes' prose tale into the smalltown America of October 1957, at the time of the Sputnik launch: a period on TV when lurid sci-fi enacted America's fear of the red menace and scared everyone half to death with protect-and-survive atomic warnings - all wittily and affectionately pastiched here.Ī wholesome and chipmunk-favoured boy called Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal), the child of a lone mother, Annie (voiced by Jennifer Aniston), is madly excited by the local moonshine-guzzling hicks' yarns of a monster in the woods, apparently connected with the Russkies' sinister spaceshot.

But it really is a little gem: a kind of apocalyptic ET, or pre-teen Terminator 2 - with maybe a drop of Dr Strangelove or Whistle Down the Wind in the mix - and all carried off with tremendous sweetness and narrative confidence. And what makes The Iron Giant even more extraordinary is that it's based on The Iron Man, one of those dire 'works for children' by Ted Hughes, with gloomy woodcut illustrations - the sort of thing only earnest English teachers think children could possibly like outside the classroom.Īnd God knows, after reading in the film's publicity material the insouciant announcement that it grew out of a story devised by the late poet laureate 'to comfort his and American poet Sylvia Plath's (1932-1963) two children following their mother's death', your first understandable impulse may be to keep your own children indoors and cover their little ears protectively at any further mention of this film, after notifying the police and the social services. I t's the best film of the week it's the best animation of the year, and it's far and away the best family movie for Christmas.

The iron man ted hughes film