Pete Townshend: How He Helped Make A Classic Animated Film
Pete Townshend is an artist who thinks visually. While he’s written lots of classic songs that stand alone, he’s also been really ambitious when it comes to creating albums with a narrative. The best example of that, of course, is the Who’s 1969 classic, Tommy. It was adapted into a 1975 film, directed by Ken Russell and starring Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson. (It also had some incredible cameos by Tina Turner, Eric Clapton, and Elton John.) In the early ’90s, it was adapted for the stage and was a hit on Broadway. And it returned to the Great White Way again this year.
The Who’s 1973 classic, Quadrophenia was adapted into a 1979 film, which featured Sting in the cast. Townshend has also had theatrical concepts for other projects, including “Lifehouse” (which later morphed into the 1971 album Who’s Next), and Townshend’s solo albums White City: A Novel (1985) and Psychoderelict (1993). These are all stories that Townshend conceived.
But his 1989 solo album, The Iron Man: The Musical By Pete Townshend, led to a truly wonderful film, and it’s one you may have missed. And if you’re picturing Tony Stark and Steve Rogers singing showtunes, don’t worry: it’s not that. The Iron Man actually has nothing to do with Avengers. It’s based on The Iron Man: A Children’s Story in Five Nights, a 1968 science fiction novel by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. It was published in the United States as The Iron Giant to avoid confusion with the Marvel comic book character, who debuted in 1962’s Tales of Suspense #39.
The novel is about a giant robot of unknown origin who suddenly appeared in the British countryside. (Back then, not all science fiction had backstories: sometimes, you just accepted that a giant robot came out of nowhere.) The robot befriends a young boy named Hogarth and defends Earth from a dragon.
Townshend’s album was more like a radio play: Pete sang the role of Hogarth, jazz icon Nina Simone was the dragon and blues legend John Lee Hooker was the titular Iron Man. The album reunited the Who for their first recordings since their breakup earlier that decade: Roger Daltrey played the role of Hogarth’s dad. The album featured one of Townshend’s sweetest ballads, “A Friend Is A Friend.”
The album got a little bit lost, buried under the hype of the Who’s 1989 reunion tour (the first of many). Townshend apparently had plans to turn the album into a stage musical. But somewhere along the line, those plans changed radically. Warner Brothers optioned the story and decided to make an animated – non-musical-film.
One would think that with the success of The Lion King — an animated film for children featuring a massively successful soundtrack courtesy of a classic rock legend — a similar route could have been taken with The Iron Giant, released 25 years ago this month. Especially considering that Harry Connick, Jr. was in the cast and was at the peak of his popularity in the ’90s. It might be best that they didn’t go in that direction. Townshend was credited as a producer on the film, even though it was much different than the musical that he envisioned.
The Iron Giant translates Hughes’ source material movingly; it’s a lovely tale about friendship and loss. The cast is excellent: Jennifer Aniston plays Hogarth’s mom, Connick Jr. plays an artist/junkyard owner and a pre-stardom Vin Diesel plays the Iron Giant, decades before he gave voice to Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Iron Giant is terrifyingly powerful, but he decides that he doesn’t want to be dangerous.
It was directed beautifully by animation legend Brad Bird, an alumnus of the creative team behind The Simpsons. But where The Simpsons is all about irony, The Iron Giant wore its heart on its sleeve and didn’t shy away from sadness or sweetness. As Bird told Salon at the time, “Certainly, you risk having your ‘hip credentials’ taken away if you want to evoke anything sad or genuinely heartfelt. There’s no more naked position to be caught in than trying to get people to feel something beyond comedy. But I think ultimately, for me, a film will never achieve a certain height if you don’t attempt to engage the heart as well as the mind. I was and am willing to look foolish in an attempt to get you to feel something.”
Anyone who has seen the film will tell you that he accomplished his mission. And he did not look foolish while doing it.
He noted, “The book was Ted Hughes’ way of dealing with his wife’s death” — his wife was the poet Sylvia Plath — “and trying to tell his kids that things go on. I thought that was very important to have in the movie.” When he was making the film, Bird was working through his own grief: his sister, Susan, had been murdered by her husband. (A documentary, The Giant’s Dream: The Making Of The Iron Giant, goes into more detail about that.) For someone so good at being funny, it was a definite artistic choice not to take that route. And for this film, it was the right choice. Bird has said that his pitch for the film was, “What if a gun had a soul?” He wondered, would that gun want to be a gun?
Sadly, the film was not successful at the box office, although Bird went on to enjoy massive success with Pixar, where he directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille. He later moved to live-action with 2011’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. And over the years, after being released on DVD (and before that, VHS tape!), and airing on cable, The Iron Giant has become something of a cult classic. Beyond that, it’s a film that helps children – and adults – to navigate loss and grief. It’s a beautiful story even without irony… or windmiling guitars. If you haven’t seen it, it’s certainly worth your time.
