“I am not a gun.”

The Iron Giant (1999) is an animated sci-fi film directed by Brad Bird in his directorial debut, released on August 6, 1999.

After the success of Disney’s The Lion King (1994), Warner Bros. hastily founded their own animation studio to try and compete. All of their attempts to compete against Disney were failures (their only box-office success was Space Jam). Among those string of flops was The Iron Giant, and to say it deserved better is a huge understatement.

The Iron Giant was based on the 1968 book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, who wrote it to help himself cope with his wife’s suicide. Upon learning about this, director Brad Bird decided to change the story into an anti-gun allegory to cope with his sister’s murder at gunpoint ten years earlier.

Because WB’s previous animated film, Quest for Camelot (1999), bombed at the box office, the budget for The Iron Giant was cut heavily, and they were only given a production time of 2½ years (most animated films take 5 years to make). But thanks to Brad Bird’s resilience and experience in television animation, the film actually got completed ahead of schedule.

Again, because of their previous string of flops, Warner Bros. had very little faith in the film, so they decided not to spend much money on marketing and advertising. But this would end up coming back to bite them, as The Iron Giant turned out to be critically acclaimed, even getting Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes! By the time they realized their mistake and spent more money on marketing, it was too late. The Iron Giant bombed at the box office, grossing only $31.3 million against a $50 million budget.

To atone for their grave mistake, Warner Bros. decided to air a 24-hour marathon of the film on Cartoon Network during Thanksgiving weekend (at the insistence of Ted Turner, who saw the movie on a plane and declared it one of the best movies he’d seen). This helped the film gain a cult following, which is probably how many of you experienced the film for the first time. It seems that Warner Bros. has publicly apologized for the mistreatment of the film, and has even commisioned an extended cut of The Iron Giant called the “Signature Edition”, which was released on Blu-ray in 2016.

This film is an instant classic that for too long has not gotten the respect it deserves. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s no time like the present.