Iron Boy is a delicate little film, so beautifully animated and marvelous on a technical level that it charms even with its exceedingly slight story.
At heart, it's a traditional coming-of-age film that hits every familiar beat in the book. The themes of religious iconography, growing pains, first love, and difficulties with family expectations are unsurprising, but handled with such deft hands they rarely feel cloying. Instead, writer/director Louis Clichy subverts numerous genre cliches with such lightness that they barely register. Watch, for example, how beautifully he handles the strained relationship between Christophe, the titular Iron Boy, and his father, who once dreamed and now farms to provide for his family.
Christophe is thirteen years old, right at the age where we start to imagine all the things we could be, while fearing the inevitability of change that growing up brings. One morning, Christophe realizes his world is quite literally askew, and his parents bring him to the doctor for help. He needs a brace, one of those iron monstrosities that is one step above medieval torture. For an already weird kid, it's effectively a permanent mark of an outcast.
As Christophe settles into his new reality, he takes up swimming to fix his back and meets with Clara, a girl a little older than him, who has moved to the area for the semester with her mom, who works as a tutor. He takes up playing the organ at the local church and proves surprisingly adept at it. With his passion and his heart spoken for, Christophe takes his first steps into his teenage years, where not everything one wishes for comes to pass.
At just a little over 80 minutes in length, Iron Boy is a brisk and breezy visit to 1980s France, yet Clichy makes it memorable thanks to his efficient and innovative use of sound and voice recordings. Most of the cast are non-actors, and their parts were recorded in the authentic environments they're depicted in. A farmhouse echoes like the real thing because it is one. The same goes for a church organ, which filled the Debussy cinema in a way that jolted awake even the most tired filmgoer on a Sunday morning.
Yet Iron Boy, for all its technical achievements, which are plenty, felt still a little distant for me. It's partly autobiographical, and Clichy leans into the hazy memory of it all. His skillfully hand-painted watercolor imagery accentuates the elusiveness of time, and everything feels just a little ephemeral, even when the story hits some darker beats. It is bittersweet and melancholy, which I appreciate more than saccharine nostalgia.
Iron Boy was made over the course of a three-year period, with Clichy as mostly the sole artist on the project. It is miraculous that it exists at all, especially in this day and age where the talentless run rampant with their apps, littering the landscape with slop and calling it art. Seen in a cinema, Iron Boy is a startling reminder of the power of handcrafted, personal artistry. It hums with love and memory, and invites us into something deeply intimate in the process.
It is a small marvel, one that will charm anyone who sees it.
