At the time, movies like Beauty and the Beast and Anastasia, full of sweeping ballgowns and magic spells, dominated the landscape. Warner Entertainment, slowly developing its animated studio, acquired the project in the mid-’90s.Īdapting a 1968 Ted Hughes science-fiction story about a giant metal robot was an odd choice for the studio, given how fantasy-skewed the animation landscape was. The Iron Giant had been in some stage of development since 1991, originally pitched by animator Richard Bazley to ex-Disney animator and studio founder Don Bluth, who passed on the project. A boy named Hogarth Hughes befriends a giant metal robot he finds in the woods, but a snooping government agent is determined to destroy the robot, which he fears is a foreign threat. The Iron Giant takes place in a small Maine town during the height of the Cold War. It’s a tale of Cold War paranoia wrapped up in a boy-meets-giant-robot veneer, and it became a hit Warner Animation couldn’t have anticipated. This week, we’re taking a look at Warner Animation’s The Iron Giant, which, if anecdotal internet information can be trusted, probably made you cry. The Beloved Animated Failures series will look back on that era, and the films that failed to define or reward their studios, but later found devoted audiences that remember them positively today. The late 1990s and early 2000s were an era of experimentation in animation, and a lot of those experiments ended in financial failure. Disney itself experimented with breaking the Renaissance formula as it headed into the new millennium. Others experimented with genre, hoping to develop their own recognizable styles. Some of the studios following in Disney’s footsteps followed its formulas to a T, making movies with lavish musical sequences and coming-of-age arcs. On the heels of the Disney Renaissance - the studio revival that resulted in animated classics like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King - plenty of other companies wanted in on the significant box-office returns Disney was seeing for its animated films. What went wrong along the way? And why did they gain such love after the fact? The Beloved Animated Failures series is out to dust off those old VHS tapes (or more accurately, find the movies on streaming) and examine some of these beloved failures. The animated movies that defined the late ‘90s and early 2000s are beloved by a generation that grew up watching them on VHS, but many of these nostalgic favorites were critical failures, box-office disappointments, or both. Your favorite childhood movie might’ve been a total box-office dud.

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