Bird's solution?

"Well, we just tried to remove all the things that separate hand-drawn stuff from CGI. Rather than trying to make the hand-drawn stuff have the look of CGI, we thought we should try to make the CGI look hand-drawn.

"We even created a software program to wobble the lines of the Giant just a little bit. Not enough to make them look like they're badly-drawn, but to make them a little less perfect than they would normally be. It's a very subtle effect. You can't see it a lot. A lot of people don't know that the Giant is computer-animated, and that, to me, says that we did our job. If we did our job, you won't feel that there's any difference."

Another approach Bird tried was putting the Giant "on twos" when he was seen with other characters that were animated "on twos" [a new pose every other frame].

"We tried to be as cognizant of that as possible, because it's something that the computer doesn't want to do," Bird relates. "You have to tell the computer to do it. It will always assume that you want everything on ones, because that's the way it's designed. So you have to target where you want to go on twos, and pull those frames out. We did a mixture of ones and twos, which is what our animation is. It's ones for faster action, and twos for slower action.

"We simplified the lighting on the characters as well. The relationship between the boy and the Giant is the core of the movie. The key to us was to make them seem like they're inhabiting the same world."

One plot point the movie doesn't address is, why is the Iron Giant on Earth? It's a subject that Bird is reluctant to discuss in detail.

"The people at Warner Bros. asked that question very early on," he says. "I didn't want to answer it because once you start to answer it, it becomes a Pandora's Box and the whole movie becomes about the Iron Giant's back story. The minute you start to talk about it, you explain a little and it begs more questions which beg more answers which beg more questions. Pretty soon it becomes a movie about a warrior race of robots and not a movie about a boy and a giant metal man.

"It was more important for me to make the Giant emblematic of our own situation on Earth; where he really doesn't know where he came from or why he's here or where he's going, and we don't either. It's the stuff that religious leaders have fought about for thousands of years.

"We did have one sequence that I really would have liked to have in there, where there's indications of

where he came from. It was a dream that the Giant had. It suggested that he came from a whole planet full of them, and there was a war going on, but it was intermingled with scenes that we had seen during the course of the movie: watching Hogarth turn off the power switch at the power station, [watching] the deer and so on. So it was done in an abstract manner. It could have been interpreted several different ways, like a dream is.

"We had some images that suggested that there was a convoy of these robots. He got loose of the convoy and was floating in space for awhile and landed on Earth. But we certainly don't go into it.

"A lot of times you can be more profound when you suggest things and you don't say them. Our intention was to make it bigger by leaving more to the imagination."

A Sequel?
But isn't the back story something Bird would develop for a sequel?

"Not by me," he responds. "And even the ending was not me saying that I want to do a sequel.

"It was two things. One, it was saying that souls don't die. In an abstract way that was what it was saying. In another way, it was a very mild little homage to the ending of all those monster movies, where they'd say 'The End ... or is it?' At one point I stupidly considered putting that into the title, but I thought it was cheap. So, I didn't.

"That was the intention of it. If anybody reads it as me trying to set up a sequel, I would have no idea where to go with a sequel. I don't think I'd be interested in doing it, myself.

"Let's put it this way: One thing that I really don't like about animation is there seems to be this pathological urge: if you ever do something well, you can't rest until you've done a crappy version of it. I can't think of a character that hasn't been ruined, where they've done several bad versions of it to end the cycle.

"Now I see Disney taking its feature characters and putting them on Saturday morning shows and videos, and I just go, 'Why?' Even though they're pretty well done by TV standards, if you're going to do something for TV, design it for TV. Don't do a cheap version of something you did really well for the movie."

As for a potential Iron Giant sequel movie or TV series, Brad Bird says, "I just hope they get interested in other things. There's a million things to do. Some projects totally lend themselves to sequels and others don't. Godfather II is a great film and obviously the Star Wars films. Particularly The Empire Strikes Back. The original James Bond ones. But I'm not a big fan of the Jaws II kind of sequel where you've done everything that you needed to do with the first one, then you're just going for the money. I hope that they wouldn't do a sequel unless they came up with a fantastic idea, and I hope that they would want to do it as well as we've done it, at the very least."

Bob Miller is an animation professional who has written extensively about the industry for Starlog, Comics Scene, Animation Magazine, Animato!, Animation Planet, Comics Buyer's Guide, and APATOONS. He currently works as storyboard supervisor for John R. Dilworth on Courage, the Cowardly Dog, coming this fall to the Cartoon Network.