The Iron Giant, and A Civil Campaign

Anyway, The Iron Giant is Warner Bros' recent foray into animated films, and it's quite good. In the 1950s, a large metal robot lands off the coast of Maine. He eats metal, and secretly consumes various metal objects, until a young boy, Hogarth, encounters him at night and saves him from being electrocuted by a power plant. They become friends, and the giants starts learning English. However, a government agent, Kent Mansley, shows up and starts snooping around, quickly realizing that Hogarth knows about the thing eating metal around the town. Convinced that whatever-it-is has to be destroyed, this sets up the basic conflict of the second half of the film.

The Iron Giant works very well as an all-ages film, with a fairly straightforward story about people choosing what they want to be. Hogarth shows the giants some old comic books (ah, the advantages of being produced by the people who own DC Comics), contrasting the heroic figure of Superman with the rampaging robot Atomo, which really hit home for him. And the secret of what the giant's really there for is pretty cleverly handled.

A couple of people I haven't heard of - Eli Marienthal and the aptly-named Vin Diesel - do the voices of Hogarth and the giant. Jennifer Aniston does Hogarth's Mom, and Harry Connick Jr. (!) does the voice of a beatnik junk collector/artist named Dean. The film is inspired by the late Ted Hughes' book The Iron Man, upon which Pete Townshend's rock album of the same name was based (Townshend is an executive producer of the film).

The animation is pretty slick, although I found a few of the characters to be a little too cartoony at first - notably Hogarth. The giant, however, is very well-rendered and in some ways seems like the most human character in the film. The story's also got a touching ending which doesn't disappoint.

Go check this one out if it's still around in your area.

I spent much of the rest of the day finishing Lois McMaster Bujold's latest Miles Vorkosigan novel, A Civil Campaign. It seems to effectively finish a transitional period in Miles' life begun in Memory and continued in Komarr. With his famous parents off-planet attending to other matters, Miles is in charge of Vorkosigan House as people gather for Emperor Gregor's wedding, including his clone-brother Mark, who sets up shop in the basement with a nutty young scientist to produce foodstuffs using peculiar insects named "butter bugs". Miles, meanwhile, is courting Ekaterin Vorsoisson, the young widow he met in Komarr, but is trying not to impose too much since she's still technically in mourning. And various intrigues involving a couple of countships on the planet arise along the way.

A Civil Campaign is one of those books which spends its first half assembling the characters and setting up their situations, and then having everything explode utterly in one disastrous chapter in the middle, with the second half seeing our characters try to cope with everything that's happened. It's more of an ensemble book than is Komarr, as Miles, Ekaterin, Mark, and Miles' cousin Ivan all have their own plot threads, but it hangs together fairly well, establishing what will presumably be the context in which Miles will live for the next several books (probably for the next decade or so of his life).

It's overall a much more rewarding book than was Komarr, although I find the issues involved in Miles' more recent adventures to be less interesting than his dramatic and uncivil campaigns up to and including Mirror Dance.