“Transformers One” is not as silly as it looks

The new Transformers animated film is ostensibly about the early lives of the characters from Hasbro's 1980s toy line, but it could also be about a class uprising and civil rights. I think Transformers One even takes a swipe at former President Donald Trump. Actually, it takes two: The main villain Sentinel Prime (convincingly voiced by Jon Hamm) says twice that what he says is the truth.

All this means: Transformers One is not quite as cheesy as it looks. Sure, it is basically a children's film, but similar to the Transformers Cartoons from the 80s: It has a message.

At least that is what director Josh Cooley believes. Cooley, who is known for his work on Toy Story 4left Pixar on March 13, 2020 to Transformers OneHe liked the script, which traced how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But when the world went into lockdown due to the spread of Covid-19, Cooley's story changed, albeit slightly.

Trump was still in office when Cooley began working on the film. He met with producers and they “started having these meetings over Zoom and just said something like, 'Holy shit, what is going on in this world?'” he says. Ultimately, the internal strife they witnessed between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film's story of friends becoming enemies, “because that's Transformers.”

Is that a lot to ask for a group of robots that transform into cars, even if their tagline is “more than meets the eye”? Yes. Still, I sat down with Cooley to ask him what exactly drew him to making the Transformers movie and how he came to hire Scarlett Johansson to voice a robot right after she had messed with OpenAI.

ANGELA WATERCUTTER: So you won an Oscar with Pixar and built your career there. What was it about a Transformers film that made you want to make this switch?

JOSH COOLEY: Well, first of all, Pixar was my first job.

You were a storyboard artist, right?

Yes. First I was an intern in the story department, then I became a storyboard artist and then I just worked my way up. I just wanted to keep going. So after Toy Story 4I thought, “Well, I just worked on a Toy history Movie,” you know what I mean?

Yes, “What now?”

How can you top that? So I wrote the script for Transformers Oneand I thought, oh, since it's an origin story, it was different than anything Transformers had done before. I love the idea of ​​the relationship between these characters. I thought, “I have to do that.”

The latest Transformers films were a combination of live-action and computer-generated characters. Transformers: The Moviefrom 1986, was animated by hand. Transformers One feels like a return to the animated Transformers, but was done entirely with CG animation.