The Iron Giant - Lessons Learnt PART ONE - Animation (OUAN402)

PART ONE - DESIGN AND AESTHETIC

The Iron Giant is, and I'm not speaking in hyperbole, my favourite film ever made. Re-watching it recently, I learnt a tonne of  lessons that can apply to my work. I'm hesitant to analyse this piece in depth for fear of ruining the WONDER and WHIMSY that it makes me feel. The character design is top notch. Everyone has a slight exaggerated look to them that gave them a great deal of energy and personality without seeming alien, distorted or creepy.

Each face is distinguishable from the others and has oodles of character

The character design reminded me of the characters from Team Fortress Two, a game well known for having a wonderful aesthetic with characters who could be identified from just their silhouettes, which is key to iconic design.

 

   

I chose to draw a few quick face designs myself.

Using basic shapes like raindrops and rectangles as guidelines, I tried to draw faces that were aesthetically appealing with minimal features that stood out. I'm not a fan of largely inflated caricatures, the likes of which you'd see drawn at a pier or something because I find them not pleasant to look at, so the hard part was finding a good mid point between boringly understated facial features and overly exaggerated features.

I think that this flippy hair guy on the bottom is my favourite of all of them.

The characters in The Iron Giant have brilliant eyes. I found I was constantly drawn to them during any scene which had talking characters which made me relate to them far more.

 

When I was in Disneyland they have this well ace thing called "Animation Academy" where they would teach everyone how to draw Disney characters which I went back to five times or so. Every single time the person running the workshop would tell us all to make the eyes the darkest point on the drawing as it draws attention to them. That's what the eyes in "The Iron Giant" are like.

I've only scratched the surface of why the film's aesthetic is so great. There's plenty to cover from the props, costumes and scenery that give a quintessential fifties vibe to the phenomenal sweeping landscape shots, but what's worth mentioning is the fantastic camerawork that is done to convey the enormous scale of the giant from a human's point of view. 

It's powerful, looming and really scary at first.