The first trailer for Paramount’s much-anticipated Transformers One was released in space early Thursday morning. The launch kicked off at 6 a.m. PT with a live-streamed countdown showing the journey into space. After one hour, the craft reached its peak at 125,000 feet above the Earth, revealing the trailer with a special intro video from the film’s voice stars: Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. The event was streamed from @TransformersMovie social accounts, The Paramount Pictures YouTube channel and co-streamed by Chris Hemsworth on Instagram.
The film, which is directed by Josh Cooley, the Oscar-winning of Toy Story 4 goes back to the beginnings of the hugely popular franchise (it’s actually the ninth Transformers movie): It’s set on the home planet of Cyberton before the Transformers arrival on Earth, and before the Autobots and Decepticons went to war.
Here’s the official synopsis: “Transformers One tells the origin story of how the most iconic characters in the “Robots in Disguises” universe, Orion Pax and D-16, went from brothers-in-arms to become sworn enemies, Optimus Prime and Megatron. The friends toil away as disposable workers beneath Cybertron’s surface until they decide to leave their life underground and learn the secret of transformation. Along the way, they befriend B-127 (Bumblebee, before he had his name and voice box ripped out) and Elita-One (Optimus Prime’s girlfriend-to-be), who was introduced as a one-off character in the original animated series.”
The film, which is billed as the first fully CG-animated Transformers movie, features the voices of Hemsworth, Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, with Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm and is produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto & Don Murphy, Michael Bay, Mark Vahradian and Aaron Dem. Originally set to be released in July, the film will now be released on Sept. 20. (This must be a popular date to release robot movies because it’s the same weekend Universal is releasing DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot!)
The film’s director Josh Cooley was kind enough to answer a few of our burning question about this fall release:
Animation Magazine: A big congrats on the splashy intergalactic trailer drop of the movie. You started working on the movie around the same time you won the Oscar for Toy Story 4, right, back in 2020?
Josh Cooley: Yes, that’s about right. And right now, we’re very close to being full animated and we’re doing our score and sound and the team are putting the beautiful final touches on the movie.
So, you went from directing one group of beloved animated toys to another group of popular toys! How did you prepare for the massive assignment?
When I joined the project, the first thing Hasbro did was give me this gigantic bible for the entire franchise. I thought I knew most of it, but the lore goes far beyond anything you’d expect, like Tolkien-style lore: it’s so deep. I knew I couldn’t put all of that in the film obviously, because it was so easy to dive in: Transformers has this mythic quality to it, like they are almost like Greek gods. There’s this epic quality about it, but it was so much fun, because I was already familiar with it. The same thing with Toy Story, where they are toys physically, but they’re real characters. That’s how I always think of them. They are robots but they’re more than: there’s much more than meets the eyes. The key is to find out the human core that we’re touching on here.
What do you love about this movie right now?
Oh, there’s so much. I think the look of this film is just epic and unlike anything that’s been done before. As you know, ILM is our animation team, and the look that they developed is just insane. Our cast is nuts, and they all brought everything to this movie, so the characters are so well-rounded, fun and yes, serious. You really feel for them which I couldn’t be more happy about.
As we can gather from the trailer and synopsis, the story is very emotional and goes back in time. Why do you think fans are going to love this particular journey into the world of the Hasbro characters?
The things you just said are what got me very interested in this film: It is an origin story that takes place before anything that we’ve ever seen with Transformers and it being when before Optimus is Optimus and before Megatron is Megatron. We get to see that they have this friendship that is like brotherhood between them, and because of what happens in their world, they start to form these two different worldviews. That’s how we we get to really understand why they became sworn enemies. It was important to me to show that Megatron, for example, wasn’t just the bad guy: I wanted people who have never seen anything about the Transformers before to come into this film and not know who was going to b good or who’s going to be the bad guy.
Can you tell us a bit about the fun visual style of the animation?
The first thing was that look and style of the original cartoon was really important to me I wanted to go to that G1 style because those characters are so appealing. They’re really clear and have these great silhouettes. It was important to hit that. In terms of the actual look of the actual film, ILM developed this look that I didn’t want to be super realistic, like it could step out of the screen and be real in our world. Instead I wanted to be believable so that could have a sense of weight and color and light to it, so it looks like you could reach out and touch it. But at the same time you can still feel the hands making it. What ILM did completely blows my mind: The look of the planet and characters and the reflections and everything is completely stunning.
What is your own personal connection to the cartoons? How old where you when you saw the first animated movie?
I remember watching the animated show and then seeing the movie in 1986 in the theater when I was seven! So I definitely had a history and nostalgia for it. Then, everybody on the crew was the same. They’d say I want to animate this character or that thing. They all had the same history. There was so much love for the franchise, so a lot of love was put into it.
When I first saw the movie, I was confused why Optimus died, like a lot of other people! What I remember is from the beginning of the movie with Unitron coming on was just the scale of the movie. That was something that I wanted to carry on to our film. I looked at that and more recently, with Dune, to get how big things can feel. The world has to feel massively huge for Transformers.
As you know several animated movies have been pushing the visual envelope over the past few years. How does Transformers One stand out in that landscape?
I will say that when I saw the first Spider-Verse movie, I was like “Oh, the game has changed!” and was thrilled to see that the studios and audiences really embrace it. I felt that now we were really able stretch out and see how we can tell stories in a new visual way that hadn’t been done before. So, didn’t want to copy something that’s already been done, but I wanted to see what felt right for this film. I think we found that with the look: As I mentioned, it feels believable and it highlights the metallic-ness of it all, but but it still doesn’t steal away from the storyline or the characters. I almost wanted the audience to get so invested in it that the animation style doesn’t distract from it.
So, come September, what do you hope audiences will take away from this trip back to the early days of our Transformer heroes?
You know setting up to make this film it was amazing for everybody so we wanted to the fans to be very happy with it and for anybody who’s never seen Transformers be really happy with There are lot of a lot of character, and lots of humor and heart revolving around that relationship between Optimus and Megatron before they became enemies. It was that I had held on to for this whole film: That’s what got me invested from the very beginning and the thing that this is really about. So it has all the action adventure and excitement of the Transformers film, but I wanted to have that underlying heart in there.
Paramount will release Transformers One in theaters on Sept. 20.
Watch the trailer launch and the trailer below:
