‘Transformers One’ Trailer Previews an Emotional Origin Story Through Animation

Paramount/Hasbro Entertainment dropped the second trailer for “Transformers One” July 25, following its San Diego Comic-Con premiere. The first animated feature reboot from director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) explores the untold origin story of Autobots on planet Cybertron before Michael Bay’s post-apocalyptic live-action franchise. We learn about the early friendship between Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) prior to becoming bitter enemies as the legendary Optimus Prime and infamous Megatron.

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Orion and D-16 are hard-working, frustrated miners, who drill underground for Energon (the source of energy storage and power generation) during a sustained drought. However, they dream of joining the elite team of Autobots led by Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm). What Cooley brings to the franchise through animation is greater emotion, humor, and stylization, thanks to the talented team at ILM (led by VFX supervisor Frazer Churchill and animation supervisor Rob Coleman) and an appealing voice cast, which also includes Scarlett Johansson as Elita, the strict mining supervisor, and Keegan-Michael Key as motor mouth B-127/Bumblebee.

Cooley, who’s had a personal connection to “Transformers” since childhood (when he played with the toys and watched the ’80s animated series), immediately embraced the chance to explore the roots of the franchise in this story about political corruption, revolution, and war. He also found ILM the perfect animation partner because of their previous experience bringing photorealism to six of the seven live-action films (they also worked on “Ultraman: Rising”).

“Scale has always been in the DNA of ‘Transformers,’ Cooley told IndieWire, “and without humans in the film as scale reference, the massive world of Cybertron is in relation to our bots. The film being entirely animated allowed everything to be believably exaggerated to make the metal planet of Cybertron not only epic, but stunningly gorgeous.”

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Cooley, who was influenced by the look of the animated series, wanted a hand-made quality to the character designs with clear silhouettes. Human relatability was also important. For the robot ecosystem, production designer Jason William Scheier (the Emmy-nominated “Blue Eye Samurai”) created a dark subterranean world where the robots are protected from alien attack in contrast to the more colorful surface, which resembles a New York-style metropolis with upside-down buildings, hanging stalactites, elegant robot deer.

Cooley told IndieWire at Annecy that he was influenced by such biblical epics as “Ben-Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” in telling his own epic story of two leaders with different world views, who inevitably clash. But “Transformers One” merely scratches the surface.

“I was coming up with so many ideas working on this; we’ll have to see what happens next,” added Cooley, who looks forward to the possibility of continuing the story of Optimus Prime and Megatron.