Jennifer Aniston's Filmography
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What if a gun had a soul? A gigantic mobile weapon from another planet is sent to destroy Earth, but is damaged on arrival and loses its memory. It is soon befriended by a young boy, Hogarth, who is an outcast at school and relishes the chance to have a real friend. However, soon the paranoid government agent Kent Mansley arrives in town, determined to destroy the giant at all costs.
The first thing We can notice about The Iron Giant is how the marketing for this film hasn't really captured the essence of this story of a small town in the 1950's with a strange metal presence in the woods. Though I liked the posters which captured the period nicely, the trailer should've gone for the same motiff, perhaps as an homage to 1950's sci-fi movie trailers. Such homages are indeed in the film itself, and are part of what is earning The Iron Giant its burgeoning online fan base.
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Annie Hughes 
American animation is growing today by leaps and bounds, but one of the obstacles that it is only slowing overcoming is the association with musicals that several decades of Disney films has given us. So, when an animated film comes along with no singing animals or cutesy characters, it's both refreshing (to animation enthusiasts) and confusing (to those used to Disney movies), but in the case of The Iron Giant, over all, a nice package. 
Though the first half gets off to a bit of a slow start, once the film gets its second wind and the action kicks in, everything done in the first half starts to fall into place, and The Iron Giant becomes a film of the 1950's like The Day the Earth Stood Still. It's a movie about being nice to each other and understanding that the world doesn't have to have war and mean people, which is what the movie's cultural central reference, Superman is all about as well. That's right, Superman, strange visitor from another planet, who gets better treatment here than the stuck-in-limbo project Superman (The Next Movie) seems to provide based on reports I've read. Though the idea of Superman is throughout the film, what The Iron Giant and Superman have in common is the suggestion that perhaps the real venue for comic book superheroes on the big screen isn't in the form of live-action heroes, but is in the realm of animation. Heck, the folks at Disney know that too, hence their wonderful film, Tarzan. Though The Iron Giant doesn't quite reach the heights of that one (score one for Disney) because of a difference in the pacing, the amount of action, and the style of animation, it comes close enough to matter, and for me to recommend.
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