In a story that looks like a real adventure. The story tells of a nine-year-old boy named Hogarth Hughes making a giant metal machine that looks like a robot. Despite the boy's ambition, the army is not satisfied with a robot in the city.
Wisely, Bird and company eschew the standard Disney formula of catchy show tunes and cuddly animal sidekicks and lead Warner Bros. toward an animation style the studio can call its own.
This is sharp, sophisticated stuff, appreciated on different levels by both parents and children, and even those who are neither. The film has impish humor, great adventure and more than a few thrills.
Watching this again 17 years after its original release, I savoured again the resemblances to Spielberg, Wilde and Brian Forbes's Whistle Down the Wind.
While youngsters will enjoy the film on one level, it reaches out to adults on a completely different plane. They will see an allegory about power and politics and the danger of allowing either to run roughshod over humanity.
