‘Transformers One’ Isn’t as Silly as It Looks

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

All of which is to say, Transformers One isn’t exactly as hokey as it looks. Sure, it’s basically a kids’ movie, but much like the Transformers cartoons of the ’80s, it does have a message.

Or, at least director Josh Cooley thinks so. Cooley, who won an Oscar for his work on Toy Story 4, left Pixar on March 13, 2020, to make Transformers One. He liked the script, which traces 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 found his story changing, if only slightly.

Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

Is that a lot to put on 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 what, exactly, led him to the Transformers movie he made and how he ended up having Scarlett Johansson as the voice of a robot right after she went toe-to-toe with OpenAI.

ANGELA WATERCUTTER: So, you won an Oscar with Pixar, built your career there. What was it about a Transformers movie that persuaded you to make this shift?

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

You were a storyboard artist, right?

Yeah. First I was an intern in the story department, and then I became a storyboard artist and then just kind of worked my way up. I just kept wanting to keep going. So after Toy Story 4, I was like, “Well, I just worked on a Toy Story movie,” you know what I mean?

Yeah, “What now?”

Like, how do you top that? So I read the script for Transformers One, and I was like, oh, being that it’s an origin story, it was unlike anything that Transformers had done before. I love the idea of the relationship between these characters. I was like, “I have to do this.”

The most recent Transformers movies have been a combination of live-action and CG characters. The Transformers: The Movie, in 1986, was animated by hand. Transformers One feels like a return to animated Transformers, but it was all done with CG animation.