OPENING DAY

My name is Alexander Teed. I'm a civil engineering draftsman in Sacramento, which means I spend my days drawing culverts and storm drains, and I'm thirty-seven years old, which means I spent a good part of the 1970s drawing robots on the back of my homework. Big ones. Lots of rivets. My mother still has a shoebox full of them.

On Friday, August 6, 1999, I took a vacation day, and my son Jesse, who is nine, and I went to the first matinee of The Iron Giant at the multiplex out by the freeway. I'd seen one commercial for it, late at night, and a single picture of a giant robot head looking down at a boy in the woods. That was all it took. I wanted to see it more than Jesse did, if I'm honest.

We sat in the middle of the middle row. There were maybe twenty other people in a theater that seats three hundred. Next door, there was a line out to the lobby for The Sixth Sense, which opened the same day.

Ninety minutes later Jesse and I walked out into the parking lot, into that Sacramento August heat that hits you like an oven door, and neither of us said anything for a while. Then Jesse said it was the best movie he had ever seen, and that includes the new Star Wars, which he saw three times in May and June. I agreed with him. I still do. When we got home he got out a stack of paper and drew giant robots until bedtime, and I sat down next to him and drew a few too, for the first time in about twenty years.

We went back with my wife Lynne on Saturday, August 21. She cried at the end. So did I, again, and I knew what was coming.

I made this page that weekend because I couldn't stand the idea that this movie might come and go without people seeing it. It is now a month later, it's down to a couple of shows a day at our multiplex, and I'm writing faster.

WHY IT'S SPECIAL

Here is the story, without spoilers. It's the fall of 1957 in a little town on the coast of Maine. The Russians have just put Sputnik up, and everybody is jumpy. A boy named Hogarth Hughes, who lives with his mother and reads too many comic books, finds a giant iron robot in the woods, taller than the trees, who eats metal and doesn't know who or what he is. Hogarth hides him, befriends him, and teaches him things. Meanwhile a government agent comes to town looking for whatever it was that people have been seeing in the woods.

That sounds like a lot of movies. It isn't like a lot of movies.

Every robot I drew when I was a kid was a weapon or a monster, because that's what robots were in every comic and movie I ever saw. This movie starts from that same place. There are hints, as the story goes along, that the Giant was built for something terrible. And then the whole movie turns on one idea: that what you were built for doesn't have to decide what you become. The Giant gets to make up his mind about who he wants to be. He watches people, and he listens to Hogarth, and he chooses. That's where the name of this page comes from.

That's a big idea for a cartoon. I'd say it's a big idea for anybody. I want my son to believe it about himself, and frankly I'd like to believe it about myself too.

On top of that, it's funny. Really funny, not winking-at-the-grown-ups funny. Hogarth is a real kid, a little bit of a pest, who talks too fast and can't sit still. His mother Annie is a waitress working long shifts and doing her best. Dean, the beatnik who runs the junkyard and welds scrap into sculpture, is the coolest grown-up in any kids' movie I can think of. And the Giant himself, who barely talks, is somehow the most expressive character on the screen. It's all in the eyes and the way he tilts his head. As a guy who draws for a living, that one knocked me over.

THE FACTS

Jesse would like me to add that Vin Diesel was also in Saving Private Ryan, which Jesse is not allowed to see, and which Jesse brings up every time this subject comes up.

THE 1957 DETAILS

My mother was eighteen in 1957. I took her to see it the week after Lynne and I went, and she spent half the movie elbowing me. The school film about hiding under your desk if the atomic bomb comes. The stack of comic books. The diner with the counter and the stools. The government man in the suit and hat who's sure the Russians are behind everything. The beatnik. She said they got it right, and she was there.

I got so carried away writing about this that it turned into its own page: The 1957 Stuff They Got Right.

WHY IS NOBODY GOING?

The Monday after it opened I looked at the box office list in the paper. The Iron Giant came in ninth. Ninth! Behind movies I won't name here because I'm trying to stay positive.

Every review I've read has been good, most of them very good. Everybody I've dragged to it has liked it. So why the empty seats? Here are my theories, for what they're worth. I'm a draftsman, not a movie executive.

• Nobody knew it was coming. I saw one commercial, once. Jesse's friends had never heard of it until he told them about it.
• It's a cartoon that isn't Disney. A lot of parents seem to decide what to take their kids to by who made it.
• It has no songs and no talking animals, so people don't know what to make of it.
• The summer was crowded. Tarzan has been out since June, and the same weekend The Iron Giant opened, everybody in America went to The Sixth Sense.
• Ten-year-olds think cartoons are for babies. They're wrong. Jesse had to defend this one on the playground.

None of these are the movie's fault. I'm afraid it will go to video and people will discover it there in a year or two and wonder why they never heard of it. That would be a shame, because it deserves to be seen on a big screen, where the Giant is actually giant.

THE ENDING

I'll be gentle about this, because even people who have seen it sometimes don't want to talk about it.

Near the end, the fear in town gets the better of the grown-ups, and things go very badly, very fast. And the Giant has a choice to make. All through the movie he has been figuring out who he is, and in the last few minutes he decides, all the way, with no going back. It is the bravest thing I've seen in a movie in a long time, and he does it for a town full of people who were afraid of him.

Lynne cried. My mother cried. Jesse didn't cry the first time, because he was too busy being astonished, but he cried the second time. I won't say whether I cried. I'll only say the theater was dark.

And then: stay to the very last scene before the credits. The movie gives you something to hold on to. Jesse cheered out loud the first time we saw it, in a nearly empty theater, and nobody minded.

FIVE REASONS TO GO

Thanks for reading this far. If you go see it because of this page, please e-mail me and tell me. It would make my week. Jesse says it would make his too.