The new animated Transformers movie is ostensibly about the early lives of the characters from Hasbro’s 1980s toy line, but it may also be about a class uprising and civil rights. Transformers One He even mocks 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 means that, Transformers One It’s not as cheesy as it sounds. Sure, it’s basically a kids’ movie, but just like the Transformers Cartoons from the 80s have a message.
Or so director Josh Cooley believes. Cooley, who won an Oscar for his work in Toy Story 4He left Pixar on March 13, 2020 to do Transformers OneHe liked the script, which tells 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 found his story changing, if only slightly.
Trump was still in office when Cooley began working on the film, and he would meet with producers and “they would start Zoom meetings saying, ‘Oh my God, what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they saw between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-and-enemies plot, “because that’s Transformers.”
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 him what, exactly, drove him to make the Transformers movie, and how he ended up having Scarlett Johansson voice a robot right after she took on OpenAI.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: You won an Oscar with Pixar and forged your career there. What convinced you to make this change in a Transformers movie?
By Josh Cooley: Well, first of all, Pixar was my first job.
You were a storyboard artist, right?
Yes. I was first an intern in the story department, then I became a storyboard artist, and then I worked my way up. I wanted to keep going. So after… Toy Story 4I was like, “Well, I just worked on a History of the toy movie,” you know what I mean?
Yes, “Now what?”
How can you top that? I read the script for Transformers OneAnd I thought, “Oh, being 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 films have been a combination of live action and computer-generated characters. The Transformers: The MovieIn 1986, it was hand-animated. Transformers One It feels like a return to the animated Transformers, but it was all done in CG animation.