The Iron Giant is notable not only because it manages to be
touching without going into the realm of
sappy, but because some of the
humor in this movie is kind of
grim for a supposed
family movie. Examples of this
black comedy include:
-The educational film Hogarth's class watches near the beginning. It discusses rather bluntly the threat of nuclear warfare that seemed prevalent during the 1950s, and mentions the actually ineffective duck and cover technique. This film-within-a-film can also be seen as a parody of similar educational films from the 1950s, the most famous of which happens to be called "Duck and Cover".
-The character of Kent Mansley is, in a nutshell, America's Cold War paranoia and fear of invasion and takeover by outsiders distilled and poured into the body of one man. Mansley fears the giant and wants to see it destroyed mainly because it blatantly goes against his worldview. In his mind, the United States of America is not only the greatest country in the world, but the greatest civilization ever made. The technology that designed the Iron Giant is centuries beyond that of American tech. In other words, the mere presence of the Giant is a big bird flipped in the face of American supremacy and values, at least in Mansley's mind. Mansley eventually gets a nuclear missle fired at the town of Rockwell, Maine, in his mad attempt to destroy the Iron Giant; this may be considered a metaphor for how such blatant paranoia nearly got us annihilated in the Cold War.
See my point? This movie can be seen as downright apocalyptic at times, but it does give an important message: We really made assholes of ourselves in the 50s.
No, that's not right. Ah, I got it...
It takes real courage to stand up to the ideas of the status quo to do what you think is right.