Subversive Elements

By David Tepper

NEW YORK, 11 January 2000 - The Iron Giant is the first children's film in a long while that adults can enjoy also. An animated film marketed as family entertainment, it is wholesomely subversive. The young ones seem to enjoy it. Only adults, however, would fully appreciate the 1950's Cold War retrospective and the Christian allegory with a neat twist: the message of nonviolence - "I am not a gun" - is delivered by a 50-foot-tall metal robot apparently designed for destruction and killing.

Adapted from Ted Hughes' children's book The Iron Man, the film starts in 1957 when a 50-foot-tall metal robot (voiced by Vin Diesel) of unknown origin or purpose splashes into the Atlantic, and makes its way to the coast of Maine. Nine-year-old Hogarth (Eli Marienthal) discovers the robot eating anything metal it can find and saves him from accidental electrocution, beginning a friendship not unlike that in E.T. This being the post-Sputnik 1950's, it's not long before the public notices huge bites taken out of cars and train tracks, and Kent Mansley (Christopher MacDonald) arrives on the scene to ferret out the truth for military purposes. Hogarth, with the help of his mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) and a beatnik junkyard owner (Harry Connick, Jr.), tries to hide the robot from the government and teaches it about humanity along the way. There are also some nifty scenes of principled civil disobedience - a topic most children's films would never dare approach.

With no showstopper songs or annoying comic sidekicks to get in the way, screenwriter/director Brad Bird and his team of animators ably conjure up the 1950's. Bright, bustling diners are juxtaposed with "duck and cover" movies. This is a world of Mom and apple pie on the one hand, and fear of beatniks and Soviets on the other, and the two aspects of this world collide violently in the emotional finale. The film itself has a certain Warner Brothers feel that's unmistakably different from, for example, Disney movies; the animation, except where computer-generated elements have been thrown into the mix, looks strictly two-dimensional, and the characters are drawm in an updated style evoking earlier WB cartoons. (Annie's lips and Mansley's chin in particular are unquestionably Warneresque.)

The lessons from this movie are numerous: the value of friendship and civil disobedience, the finality of death, the dangers of pretend violence, and the need to turn the other cheek when all one's instincts demand self-defense. But in spite of all that, only once does it even approach preachiness, and the scene it sets up is so sincere in its intentions and genuinely touching that any overt lesson-mongering is easily forgiven.

Don't just rent this movie. Buy it for your collection.

On the other end of the animation spectrum, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut parades its subversion around for all to see. If there's such a thing as an animated exploitation film - a low-budget, deliberately, crudely made movie that shamelessly goes for the lowest common denominator - this is it. The plot - such as it is - starts off with the familar South Park boys, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny, sneaking into an R-rated movie and learning how to swear. From there, things veer off into war on Canada, gay sex between Satan and Saddam Hussein, and the Apocalypse.

But really, the plot doesn't matter. For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who direct, provide main voices, and do pretty much everything else, it's a game rather than a movie. The object is to take potshots at as many targets as possible, in the most disgusting and profane ways imaginable.

Mind you, it's an extremely funny game most of the time, and it will appeal to those with a certain juvenile mindset and a hardy stomach. But neither the film's potty language (however creative) nor the scattershot (if often funny) satire adds up to much of substance. South Park is just the cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird at all and sundry; those who find much deeper meaning in it are probably giving it too much credit.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, rent it on two-for-one night and have a couple of drinks with it to get in the mood.

The Iron Giant is rated PG for mild profanity, suspense, and extreme but non-bloody military violence. It would be fine for 7-year-olds and up (including their parents); ages 5 and 6 might find it too intense at some points, too boring in others. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut is rated R for much filthy language, gross construction-paper violence, audibly explicit sex, and just about anything else you can imagine; it should have gotten an NC-17. It is not at all appropriate for children, or for most adults, for that matter.