This new Transformers animated film may seem to be about the childhood lives of the characters from Hasbro’s 1980s toy line, but it could also be about class rebellion and civil rights. I think Transformers One even mocking former President Donald Trump. Actually, it took two people: The main villain Sentinel Prime (convincingly voiced by Jon Hamm) says twice that the truth is what he says it is.
All of which means, Transformers One It’s not as silly as it looks. Sure, it’s basically a kids’ movie, but like Transformer 80s cartoon, it has a message.
Or, at least, that’s what director Josh Cooley thinks. Cooley, who won an Oscar for his work Toy Story 4left Pixar on March 13, 2020 to work on Transformers One. He loved the script, which followed how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley saw his story change, if only slightly.
Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he would have meetings with producers and they would “start these Zoom meetings just saying, ‘Oh my gosh, what in the world is going on?’” he said. Ultimately, the infighting they saw between Democrats and Republicans within the same family became an undercurrent to the film’s frenemy-turned-friends plot, “because that’s what Transformers is about.”
Is it too much to put in a bunch of robots that turn into cars, even if their tagline is “more than meets the eye”? Yes. Still, I sat down with Cooley to ask exactly what led him to the Transformers movie he did, and how he ended up getting Scarlett Johansson to voice a robot so soon after she left vs OpenAI.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: So, you won an Oscar with Pixar, built your career there. What was it about Transformers that convinced you to make this change?
JOSH COOLEY: Well, first of all, Pixar was my first job.
Are you a storyboard artist?
Yeah. I was first an intern in the comic department, then I became a storyboard artist, and then I just kept moving up. I just wanted to keep going. So then Toy Story 4I thought, “Oh, I just worked on a Toy Story movie,” you know what I mean?
Well, “What now?”
Like, how do you get past that? So I read the script for Transformers Oneand I thought, well, since this is an origin story, it’s unlike anything Transformers has done before. I love the idea of the relationship between these characters. I thought, “I have to do this.”
The most recent Transformers movies have been a combination of live-action and CG characters. Transformers: The Moviein 1986, hand-animated. Transformers One It feels like a return to the Transformers animated series, but it’s all done with CG animation.
