The Iron Giant - homage to Jesus Christ?

Hello, everyone.

'The Iron Giant' was, and is still, one of my favorite animated movies. The acting was great, the animations were awesome, and most of all, the message was powerful. Anyone who watched the movie would probably remember how particularly touching the 'Superman' scene was.

I must raise the question of whether the director Brad Bird tried to insert a little homage to the Biblical Jesus somewhere in that scene. But first, let me reiterate the similarities between the two stories.

It isn't hard to notice a striking resemblance of the 'death' of the Iron Giant to the death of Christ in the Bible. Notice how they are both extremely powerful, and yet they are put to death by the hands of the very people they intended to save; with their abilities, they could have easily escaped or even crushed or enslaved their tormentors, but chose to sacrifice their life for the greater good. Both are also capable of feeling human emotions, but are also part 'otherworldy' - the giant being a weapon of mass destruction from an alien realm, and Christ being a divine 'God-made-man'. And of course, after they are destroyed, they 'resurrect' - the giant re-asssembles its pieces from Greenland (IIRC?), and Jesus rises from the tomb.

Since I'm a new member here, the site won't allow me to post the link to the video. Anyways, go to YouTube and search for a video called "The Iron Giant - Missile Scene [High Quality] by ThePhysGun.

In this scene where the missile blows up and seemingly destroys the robot, at 3:22 in the video (after Hogarth's mother embraces him and he walks away and looks up at the sky), we can clearly see that the explosion transformed into some sort of cross-shaped 'glint'. Could this be a reference to the Bible? While Bird did not mention any intent of his for his movie to have any religious message, could he have inserted that little detail for the viewers to hopefully understand its resemblance to the Biblical Jesus?

What are your thoughts on this? Thanks for reading!

Regards,
Lonious

One of the things that makes questions like this difficult to answer is that the Biblical story is, in effect, all stories. It touches on so many major themes of human experience that it's probably impossible to tell a good story that doesn't, in some way, reflect it.

So it could be that Bird is telling a version of Christ's story, or it could be that any good story about sacrifice or redemption will inevitably bring Christ to mind. Or both.

Could be. Since the story of Jesus is popular and understood by a lot of people in the west, maybe some filmmakers use allegories to the Jesus story to get their message across.

Heck, they even did it in Star Wars (Anakin being born of a virgin and all that).

The Iron Giant was born of a virgin too. Nuclear, but a virgin.

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It was done in Man of Steel too, but since I've never kept up with the comics I'm not sure if this was something they'd been doing with Superman all along, or something they decided to do in just this movie.

Thanks for your replies!

However, I'm particularly referring to the 'cross-shaped' glint in the sky after the missile blows up...could THAT be a homage to Jesus? And I don't get why people always mention Superman...was there a cross-shaped glint in Superman too? Am I missing something?

In Man of Steel there was a scene where Superman floated in space with his arms stretched out to resemble a cross.

The whole thing about him being "Krypton's first natural birth in centuries" also seemed like a reference to the Jesus story.

People mention Superman because the Christ symbolism is particularly strong in that story. He's represented as morally pure, very powerful, and he's a savior sent to earth by his father.