10 Movies We're Embarrassed To Admit Got Us All Choked Up

2. The Iron Giant

First and foremost, Iron Giant was the story of how children are capable of forming unhealthy relationships with literally anything, and that includes alien robots with amnesia during the 1950s. Most of the movie proves this point as we watch bumbling Hogarth hide his new best friend from his mom and that creepy red-haired man. The plucky adventure story shifts gears, however, when the giant reverts back to killing mode, presumably because that bump on his head that made him docile for the first two acts was where his "Kill All Humans" button was. The giant transformed into a gun-toting behemoth, blowing up cars and making every pre-pubescent child in the audience feel conflicted over whether or not it was OK that their onscreen friend had just become a walking murder machine (it was OK for most of us). But the giant reverts to normal, and everything seems fine until a nuclear missile is launched toward the small town he was just terrorising. Before our eyes, the giant selflessly flies into the sky and collides with missile, making every child in the audience cry tears of conflicted sadness, probably for the first time. Of course, nothing choked us up more than the final scene where the missing pieces of the giant are shown to be re-assembling in Antarctica. Too many emotions.