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If nothing else, Transformers One is a visual spectacle. This is thanks to the work done by director Josh Cooley and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who has been a guiding force in the franchise for years.
The latest Transformers movie is an animated adventure, a far cry from the previous installments. It is a vibrant-looking movie with stunning visuals. Oh, and it takes place on Cybertron, a place live-action could never take the series.
For di Bonaventura, Transformers One features details never before seen.
“I would say transforming the planet in a way would be the hardest one to make it feel real and organic with the rest of the movie, just because it's so unusual,” he said. “Sometimes I think you can trick peoples' eyes because it's familiar. If it's not familiar, like, how does a planet transform? That'd be really hard to trick your eye or have your eye accept the reality of that.”
He conceded that while Transformers One may not have “the most complicated animation,” the transforming sequences would be the “hardest” to accomplish in live-action form.
Director Cooley liked di Bonaventura's answer. But for him, seeing the inside of Cybertron is his favorite sequence. He explained that the animation in the sequence “allows you to exaggerate greatly. And you buy it very similar to what we're talking about with the surface transforming.”
Cooley added, “I think that moment. I don't feel like I've ever taken out of it because it's too fantastical. I feel like it belongs in the movie because it's everything around it's animated.”
How Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia inspired Transformers One
Transformers One is an origin story for Optimus Prime and Megatron, voiced by Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. For Cooley, movies with an “epic scope but with a core relationship” inspired him.
“It made me think of Spartacus and even Lawrence of Arabia, and just those huge epic movies,” Cooley claimed. “I feel like we definitely looked at how to frame a shot like that, where you've got tiny characters in a massive world.”
For di Bonaventura, he had a clear mission: Make Cybertron in Transformers One unlike anything else seen in sci-fi. He is “bored” of how cinema has previously portrayed alien planets. (He classified them as “dark, foreboding, and strange.”)
The Transformers One crew made that their mission. They wanted to take viewers in the opposite direction, making Cybertron “colorful” and pop. (“I'm kind of bored [of] every alien planet [being] a desert scape,” di Bonaventura said.)
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“We have that kind of scale, but I think it's accentuated, frankly, by the color choices that are going on in the positive thing,” he concluded.
The inevitable GI Joe and Transformers crossover
While Transformers One took the franchise to the animated medium, do not expect the eventual GI Joe crossover to do the same. Without hesitating, di Bonaventura quickly reassured me that the movie would “for sure be live-action.”
Currently, the biggest hurdle is finding the right balance of characters between the two franchises. The story has two mega franchises to feature in a feature-length movie. At the same point, di Bonaventura does not want to overwhelm his audience.
“What is really complicated about the Transformers movies is you have a lot of characters you're trying to manage, [and] now you're going to add all these Joe characters?” he said. “So the first inclination is to have lots [of character]. And then what happens is you realize you can't do a great job with any of them. So, you have to kind of pare it back until you get to that core group. And that's what we're working on right now.”
As for the story, di Bonaventura hopes that it is “very different” adding in GI Joe. That does not mean it will all be smooth sailing — he acknowledges that there are limitations to the interactions between Transformers and humans.
“One of the things that has always been a bit of a struggle in the Transformers worlds is, What the hell can a human being do up against these giant robots? Well, the Joes have pretty cool weapons, and they have skills if you would,” said di Bonaventura. “So I think that's going to be a big difference is that the humans are going to have causality in a way that we've never been able to have them before.”
Transformers One will be released on September 20.
