PART TWO of Starlog's recent article on The IRON GIANT and a great interview with Brad Bird. This issue (September #266) has some great pictures too - I encourage you to check it out!
CLICK HERE to go back to Part One
A Boy & His Robot
Bill Warren
Part Two
 SOFT IRON HEART
Once aspect of E.T. that Bird was influenced by was its emotional honesty.  "I think that it's all right to have the scene where they're sniffing the father's shirt and missing him, or E.T. dying, or Mom being freaked out because Dad is with some woman in Mexico.  That's the stuff that gave it a little bit of darkness that made the light stuff even brighter."
While the human characters and their backgrounds in Iron Giant are rendered classic, hand-drawn cel animation, the Iron Giant itself - or himself - was created through computer graphics animation, and has an interesting, "retro" design. "Joe Johnston did the design of the robot as a favor,"  says Bird. "I was lucky that he was intrigued by the design challenge to come in and do a little work.  He was in the middle of October Sky (which Johnston directed).
"We modeled it after a locomotive, but I don't remember the name of it.  We worked very hard on it, because it's hard to be simple.  Before I got involved in the project, earlier designs of the Giant had all these metal eyebrows and metal lips that curved this way and that.  It seemed too much like he was designed for expressions, and Joe tried to find what minimal shapes we could have for the face and still get emotions from it."
The robot, for lack of facial mobility, is surprising, even touchingly, expressive.  "That's a tribute not only to the robot's design,"  Bird admits, "but to the animators, particularly to Steve Markowsky, the lead animator on the Giant. We had a whole team of young CGI animators who were in a tough position.  The CGI had to be as emotive as the 2-D animation."
One problem Bird wanted to deal with in particular involved keeping the CGI from standing out glaringly in a movie that's otherwise traditionally animated.  "I'm a big fan of CGI," he says, "but I had trouble in the ballroom scene of Beauty & the Beast, because it felt like a computerized ballroom with 2D characters in it.  We really wanted there to be no separation between the two, even though some people said it was OK if the Giant looked completely different, because he's a machine.
"I say they're existing in the same world,  and they can't look like they're existing in separate worlds.  We really worked hard to erase the separation; sometimes the way we did that was really weird things like exposing shots on twos (two frames pre movement) for the Giant instead of ones.  We also came up with a program that introduced a little bit of line wobble."
But isn't this actually making the animation worse?  Far from it, says Bird. "I think there is great pleasure in slight imperfection.  I'm a big George Gershwin fan.  Years ago, I bought several different performances of 'Rhapsody in Blue.'  (Conductor) Zubin Mehat's rendition is technically perfect; every note was hit with absolute perfection.  But I found myself listening more often to the Leonard Bernstein version; it had a little bit of scruffiness to it, because it was pure passion.  Not to say that you should be imperfect, but there's a warmth to imperfection.  We tried to make sure that the Giant felt as warm as the 2D did."
There are similar scenes in Johnston's October Sky and Bird's The Iron Giant, such as the appearance of Sputnik at the beginning of both films- Johnston's script even included a close shot of Sputnik passing the camera, as does the animated feature, but it was cut from October Sky before production began.  "There's actually one more shot of Sputnik in our movie," Bird points out, "and it's a real little geek thing.  There's a shot where the Giant crests a hill and looks down into the town of Rockwell for the first time.  If you look, way up in the sky, there's a little tiny thing going by.  That's Sputnik."

TORN IRON CURTAINS
Bird chose to set the Iron Giant in 1957 because "America was really freaked out about the idea that the Soviet Union was ahead of us in space.  I think they imagined the Russians were going to litter outer space with death rays, or something.  The atomic bomb had been unleashed, and now was multiplying on a yearly basis.  The idea that a piece of technology was floating above us and potentially watching us was something that unsettled America to a great degree.
"Look at the films of that time," Bird continues. "They're very strange responses to the bugaboos of the period, which included America's feeling that technology was getting away from them.  They were exhilarated by technology, and at the same time, afraid that it was going to overtake them."
The Iron Giant pays little tributes to various movies, including It Came From Outer Space, Invaders from Mars, and Fiend Without a Face.  The film's several Superman references are likely to touch fans of the character; there's even a reproduction of a real issue of Action Comics.  "I like Superman," Bird says.  "A couple of people involved with the TV show saw it, and were happy about the tip of the hat.  I also put a little thing in there about The Spirit."
Bird, in fact, has written a script for a feature version of Will Eisner's famed comic-book detective.  "I wanted a plug for a comic that I think is a little neglected."
He feels that his involvement with The Simpsons was absolutely crucial to being able to turn The Iron Giant out on a much shorter schedule and lower budget than Warner's previous animated  feature, Quest for Camelot.  "There is often a snobbery between TV and feature animation," he insists. "On The Simpsons, there were shows that we did where they were in deep trouble two weeks before they were to air.  We would all get together in a room and go through the episode, and if we didn't solve the problem before we left the room, it was going to be forever flawed.  Each Simpsons story has a beginning, a middle and an end, A stories and B stories and through lines.  It was the best school for seeing how things can be structured and restructured, and for focusing on weaknesses, that anyone could ever hope to go to.  I was just lucky to be there with all these brilliant people.  I learned how to make decisions quickly."
Still, Bird thinks that with The Iron Giant, he only got about halfway to his goal.  "The half that we got is that I don't think it feels totally like a Disney movie.  If it does feel that way to older people, I hope they say that if feels like an older Disney movie, because I think their rhythms are more like mine.  Meaning that there isn't this manic jabbering and quick cutting, as if the audience has a remote and is going to change the channel.  I admire the breathing space  that the older Disney films occasionally had, and I tried very hard to get some of that space into this film, so that there are moments of quiet, moments of pausing a beat.  That not only gives the film a little air, but a greater contrast, so that when you do speed things up, it feels like you're animating.
"We did everything story wise for this film that we set out to do, but there are other kinds of animated films that would be very successful that could be a little rougher.  Not R-rated rougher, but possible PG-13 rougher.  The problem is that there's this big gulf between slightly more adult-oriented material and quality animation.  It's like you have material aimed a little more at teenagers and adults, it has to animated for $1.98.  If it is animated really well, with great production values and terrific animators, then it must be a formula we've seen a billion times before in terms of story.  It must be safe for your two-year-old.
"There's something fabulous between those widely contrasting views - and it's basically where most moviemaking really is.  I hate the fact that animation can't sit at the grownup table.  I don't mean we would remove the innocence, romance, wonder or any of the things that make mainstream story telling delightful. I'm just asking, 'Why do we always have to do it the same way?'
"The project I was developing for Turner was definitely leaning more towards, and the audience Warners recognized for animation, which is kids and families.  With Iron Giant, I tried to do something that would definitely work for families, but that had enough goodies in it for adults, so they could enjoy it, too."
IRON-CLAD ANIMATION
Indeed, making animation for an older crowd in important to Bird.  "I would love it if we could get teenagers in to see this movie.  It's not hard core, it does have an innocence to it, and someone who hated E.T. would probably hate The Iron Giant, too.  But there's more of an edge to it than most people would imagine.  I'm not a big fan of testing, but that's the way things are run nowadays.  Animation usually tests very low with adult males, with the dads - and we tested very high with the dads, actually higher than we did with the moms.  It's interesting that men like this.  I think it's because it's a kind of boy film - but girls seem to like ti very much, too.
"There's a tendency to take the intensity out of an animated film simply because it might freak out a three-year-old.  In doing that, they're missing out on everyone else.  Old Disney movies used to have moments that really freaked children out, and I think that's OK.  If you've got a four-year-old, don't take him to a PG movie.
"I'm a big fan of Disney animation, " Bird insists, but he believes that other animation companies have emulated the wrong aspects of Disney.  "It's not about the dewdrops, the glistening eyes or the 400 cranes flying; it's about seeing emotion in the character's faces, even though they're drawn.  That, to me, is what Disney really created, and the old Disney masters did better than anyone- creating things that were alive while you were watching them.
"If you look at the seven dwarfs, they're basically all the same size; the differences in design are there, but even if they looked exactly alike, you could tell one from the other by the way they moved.  That's one lesson in animation that so many people seem to be missing.
"People also get very impressed by how smooth movement is, and how many little lines you can see; that's nice, but that's not the main meal.  The main meal is the quality of movement in terms of character.  I wouldn't mind if the film were even a little rougher and cruder if I could tell the characters each had their own vocabulary of movement," Brad Bird says.  "That's why when I see Nick Park's stuff, the Pixar stuff or the new stuff from Disney, a little part of me becomes a kid again, because to me, that's the magic of animation; how you can make these drawings seem like they have a mind of their own."

STARLOG SEPTEMBER 1999 #266

 

 
 
 
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