Movies
The Iron Giant
The director Brad Bird (“The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille”) fills the CinemaScope screen with wit and beauty in this modern fairy tale, from 1999, about a huge robot from outer space who washes up on the shores of a town called Rockwell, Maine, in 1957 and befriends a youngster named Hogarth Hughes. Bird and his collaborators take an odd, elegiac fable by the late British poet Ted Hughes and turn it into a piquant variation on the best of all fish-out-of-water films, “E.T.” The beguiling visuals meld a computer-generated giant with humans who are drawn in an angular, caricature-like style that’s a lot bolder than that of most animated films; the ticklish period touches include a crawling-brain movie glimpsed on late-night TV and the beatnik stylings of a scrap collector and artist named Dean. The movie provides a master class in the use of scale and perspective—and in its power to open up a viewer’s heart and mind.