The Iron Giant

Brad Bird worked on the same lot and in the same tradition, and the films rhyme deliberately: a lonely boy with an absent father hides an enormous secret in the shed, feeds it, teaches it to speak, and then has to protect it from government men who arrive in convoy. Both end with a sacrifice and a departure rather than a victory. Bird's change is the giant's own choice, which E.T. never has to make.

Brad Bird's film adapts Ted Hughes's 1968 children's novel, published in the United States as The Iron Giant and credited on screen. The adaptation keeps the boy, the eating of farm machinery and the giant's self sacrifice, and replaces the space dragon of the book's second half with 1957 Maine and a Cold War the novel does not have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Man_(novel)