IRON MAN REIMAGINED
Bird, who directed and co-wrote The Iron Giant, is a little nervous about relating his film's plot.  "Oh, well, it takes place, and it's basically, you know, having something from outer space land in the middle of Norman Rockwell-land, and the beginning of the Cold War.  Oh God, I should have all this ready and smooth by now, but I'm just completely in the middle of it still..."
Slowly, however, the story unfolds.  Loosely adapted from The Iron Man by the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes, The Iron Giant opens in 1957, just after the Soviets had launched Sputnik.  A huge, fiery object crashes into the ocean off the coast of Maine, and later, in a quaint seaside town, metallic objects either go missing or are found with enormous bite-shaped portions taken out of them.  Hogarth Hughes (voiced by Eli Marienthal), a nine-year-old boy who lives with his waitress mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) in a house on the outskirts of town, doesn't have many friends.  Bored and precocious, he spends many hours alone in a nearby forest, much to the concern of his mother, who isn't exactly thrilled with the animals he constantly finds and hopes to keep as pets.
But one night, while exploring strange occurrences around his house and at the nearby power station in the forest, Hogarth discovers the metal eater from space - a towering robot.  Trying to make a dinner out of the station's live power couplings, the robot is caught in a potent electric arc, and only Hogarth's swift intervention saves the titan.  The incident instills a kind of loyalty in the beast towards the boy.  The robot, who cannot talk initially, is apparently lonely and thankful for Hogarth's kind act, and while at first Hogarth realizes how incredibly cool it is to have a metal man taller than the tallest trees as a friend, it becomes more problematic when the robot, who doesn't take direction well, begins to follow Hogarth home.  While trying to break the Iron Giant of its anti-social habit of eating things like cars and tractors, Hogarth must also keep it a secret from his Mom.  After a few close calls, Hogarth entreats his new friend Dean (Harry Connick Jr.) - a mildly reclusive beatnik artist who runs the local scrap yard and turns unwanted metal into modern art - to hide the Giant.  But trouble brews in the form of suspicious government agent Kent (Christopher McDonald).
And questions remain. Like, just what is the Giant, and why is he on Earth?  Hogarth, a comic book fan, tries to give the robot a more positive spin on his potential by introducing him to comics, most specifically, the adventures of the other Man of Steel, Superman.  Realizing that he is a machine, and that weapons are machines the robot voices his one desire: "I do not want to be a gun."
That line, and what it comes to mean in the movie, is the basis of Bird's involvement in The Iron Giant.  Bird first gained recognition as the creator of Family Dog, an animated episode of Amazing Stories (which later spun off as a series not involving Bird).  Fresh, original and funny, it seemed to promise great things for the animator, but The Iron Giant is the first production he has really controlled since then.
Bird started animating at age 11, completing a film when he was 13.  By 14, Milt Kahl, one of the legendary "Nine Old Men" of Disney animation, became his mentor (two of the other nine, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, have vocal cameos in The Iron Giant).  Bird co-scripted *batteries not included, then worked as Executive Consultant on The Simpsons for nearly 180 episodes.  After a brief stint on Kin of the Hill, he then began to work on a film.
"I was involved with Turner Feature Animation on a project that didn't work out," Bird explains, "and I got swallowed up into Warner Bros. when they swallowed up Turner. They asked if there was anything they had in development that I would be interested in doing.  I looked at a few things, then I saw a drawing from The Iron Giant.  An image of a boy and a big machine, and I liked that.  So they gave me the Ted Hughes novel; I read it and liked it, but told them I wanted to go a different way.  I considered the question: 'What if a gun had a soul?'
"The movie's central idea is still of a little boy and a big metal man from outer space who eats junk in a junkyard, but not too many other things from the book are in there.  It had originally been intended as a musical with Pete Townsend," who did a "concept album" based on the book almost a decade ago.  Initially, the movie was to be based on Townsend's album, but, says Bird, "I felt my story didn't lend itself to that approach very well."
The director also cites several classic movies as inspiration for The Iron Giant.  "The films I was influenced by on this," he says, "were The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T., Frankenstein,  King Kong, even The Black Stallion in that there's a boy and a big powerful thing that the boy has to sort of train."
Eventually, Hogarth teaches the Giant to talk, but even that does not mitigate all the misunderstanding, especially when the Robot is severely damaged but begins to repair itself, imperfectly and with some hilarious side effects.  At one point, Hogarth is confronted with a walking metal hand the size of a pony scampering about his house - a hand he has to keep hidden from his mother as well as the prying Kent.  Bird has instructed the CGI animators to treat the hand as if it were a large, friendly puppy.
"Even Terminator 2 influenced me to a certain extent," Bird notes, "because it's again a boy with a machine, and the boy is teaching the machine.  It all comes down to a basic mythology of man and machines, and men and big monsters.  You can go into what the monsters represent, that side of it, but the basic mythology is older than Ted Hughes book, or movies themselves - it goes back thousands and thousands of years.  There's something powerful about that notion."