The Iron Giant

The Iron Giant is the 1999 animated science fiction film directed by Brad Bird (in his feature directorial debut) for Warner Bros. Feature Animation. The film featured original score composed by Michael Kamen, in his first and only collaboration with Bird, as all his future films were scored by Michael Giacchino beginning with The Incredibles (2004). The score featured additional performance from the Czech Philharmonic symphony orchestra at Prague, conducted by Kamen himself and recording of the score happened within one week. The film had two soundtracks being released for the promotions of the film. The first soundtrack is a collection of compilation songs performed by popular artists from the 1950s and 1960s, while the second featured Kamen's original score and a song which he performed along with Eric Clapton. All the two albums were released by Rhino Entertainment and Varèse Sarabande in August 1999. The score album had subsequent releases: a vinyl remastered album published by Mondo and a deluxe edition, containing additional material from the score, including a vinyl release in the future. The score received positive critical reception, praising Kamen's composition. For his score, Kamen won the Annie Award for Music in an Animated Feature Production. Production Bird's original temp score, "a collection of Bernard Herrmann cues from '50s and '60s sci-fi films," initially scared Kamen. Believing the sound of the orchestra is important to the feeling of the film, Kamen "decided to comb eastern Europe for an "old-fashioned" sounding orchestra and went to Prague to hear Vladimir Ashkenazy conduct the Czech Philharmonic in Strauss's An Alpine Symphony." Eventually, the Czech Philharmonic was the orchestra used for the film's score, with Bird describing the symphony orchestra as "an amazing collection of musicians." The score for The Iron Giant was recorded in a rather unconventional manner, compared to most films: recorded over one week at the Rudolfinum in Prague, the music was recorded without conventional uses of syncing the music, in a method Kamen described in a 1999 interview as "[being able to] play the music as if it were a piece of classical repertoire."