How ‘Transformers One’ Director Josh Cooley Created an Entire Planet That Can Transform
“Transformers One” is the first fully animated Transformers movie since 1986’s deeply traumatic “Transformers: The Movie,” which was notable for, among other things, killing off Optimus Prime. (Don’t worry, he came back.) In the years since, the series from Hasbro and Paramount was mounted as live-action features, with the latest, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” coming out in 2023.
Not that “Transformers One” is concerned with any of this. Instead of getting lost in the lore, it offers a fresh approach, following a young Optimus Prime, here known as Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and his bestie D-16, who will one day become his sworn enemy Megatron (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry). They are just trying to prove that they are truly more than meets the eye — even if at the beginning of the movie they can’t even transform.
Director Josh Cooley, who won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature for “Toy Story 4,” brings a lightness to the material and a sense of wonder; both were desperately missing from the Michael Bay-directed entries. (Bay returns as a producer here.) The animation from Industrial Light & Magic is bright and fresh, with an aesthetic that could easily be described as 1980s lunchbox chic.
“I grew up in the ’80s watching the original ‘Transformers’ cartoon, and it’s one of the things that really got me into animation,” Cooley told TheWrap of the simultaneously retro and futuristic aesthetic. “And knowing that we were going to go back to the G1 designs to be influenced by that, it just felt correct.”
If there’s a single sequence that exemplifies Cooley’s approach to the franchise, it’s one where our characters — Orion, D-16, B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) and Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) — escape the futuristic city where they live, taking a train to the surface of their robotic planet Cybertron, a place that is very off-limits. While there, they see things they have never seen before.
“One of the things that got me interested in this film was the idea of this planet that is all made of metal,” Cooley said. “It’s where all the Transformers live, where they come from. We thought, ‘Why can’t the planet itself transform and move around?’ That’s something I’ve never seen and thought could be really fascinating to check out and also make it beautiful at the same time. The planet is so important to these characters, basically what they’re fighting for the entire time.”
The ILM animators gave the sequence a thrilling, almost stop-motion feeling. Their guiding principle when it came to the way the rock formations looked? “The planet itself can move and transform, like the way we have wind or waves or plate tectonics on our planet, so let’s make it super cool and different and awe-inspiring,” Cooley explained. “That’s how the scene came about, like, let’s just show this off as cool as possible. It was sci-fi and futuristic, but still felt like a real planet.” The filmmaker said a huge part of their design inspiration for the rock formations, which grow and morph as trains move past them, were the background paintings of legendary Warner Bros. artist Maurice Noble, particularly his work on the Road Runner shorts.
The sequence also features some of the most memorable characters in the movie: a herd of robotic deer. “Hasbro was great about giving us all the information about Transformers that they possibly have,” Cooley added. “And there was one page all about Cybertronian animals. This planet has to be alive, even though it’s metal. And so having the robo-deer up there felt like it was part of an ecosystem that exists, even without the Transformers.”
This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap magazine. Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
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