The first trailer for Transformers One is here, giving us a look at the first animated Transformers movie in 40 years - as well as a glimpse at Optimus Prime and Megatron before they were known by those names.
Instead, when Transformers One hits theaters on September 20, 2024, it'll find Optimus Prime in his younger years as he goes by Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth), as well as an earlier version of Megatron known as D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). It'll serve as something as an origin story for the two, showing them as brothers-in-arms before their relationship eventually falls apart.
Today's trailer gave us just a taste of that, showing Orion Pax and D-16 playfully butting heads while they try to figure out their new abilities along with Elita-One (Scarlett Johansson) and B-127/Bumblebee (Keegan-Michael Key). Like the footage shown at CinemaCon, it's a pretty light-hearted affair - but, in an interview with IGN in conjunction with the trailer release, director Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4, Inside Out) teases that it'll certainly get darker as Orion Pax and D-16 run into disagreements.
Below, Cooley delves deeper about landing on the CG-driven animation style, what we'll see of Orion Pax and D-16's relationship, making Megatron more understandable, and a whole lot more.
Transformers has a long legacy in 2D animation, so how did you guys land on this specific, more CG-driven look?
Josh Cooley: Because of where it exists in the timeline, there was no reason to have humans. So the live-action aspect of it was off the table. This whole thing being on their planet and Cybertron, which is completely made of living metal, which means that it can transform itself and move around, and that our characters are robots, it just felt natural to tell this movie in CG. Even though it is animated, my whole goal was to make it feel believable. You don't look at it and go, "this is real," but you look at it and you almost forget that you're watching an animated film and you're just enjoying this characters. So my goal is always to have a level of believability to it.
One thing that jumped out at me in the trailer is that they don't have faceplates, so they have full faces. They have eyes, noses, mouths. Was that an intentional choice to allow the characters to be more expressive?
Cooley: Absolutely. Yeah. Everything in CG is a choice, because nothing's real and nothing is for free. So first of all, they have to earn their faceplates. They don't just get them right away. They have to earn the rights for them, basically. Yeah, in order to have these characters be able to emote clearly, I wanted be able to see their eyes, see their faces. That's why we went back to kind of the G1 style of design for these characters, the original cartoon, that had very expressive faces and wanted to do an updated version of that.
I think, when talking about Transformers One, a lot of people look back to Transformers: The Movie, since that was the last animated Transformers movie. Is Transformers One taking inspiration from that movie at all or any other particular Transformers media?
Cooley: Well, not specifically that film or any other film, except for the fact that they're the same characters. When I joined, I read this script, I was like, "oh, this is an origin story on the planet" which is very cool. I've never seen that before. Then Hasbro gave me the bible of Transformers, which is, "here's the entire timeline." I didn't realize that all we've seen in film is only this tiny bit of this gigantic story.
"Hasbro gave me the bible of Transformers... I didn't realize that all we've seen in film is only this tiny bit of this gigantic story.
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Being that we were telling the beginning of the story that we've never seen on film before was really exciting to me. So there was nothing that we could borrow from the other films except for the fact that they are the same characters. We're just backing up in the timeline and going, who are they before they became what we know?
I'm so curious about that bible. How much haven't we seen about Transformers lore?
Cooley: It's massive. I couldn't believe it. It's like, Lord of the Rings, Tolkien style. It's huge.
Going back to the trailer, I was almost a little surprised about how lighthearted it was. Is this movie more targeted towards younger audiences?
Cooley: I would say that we set out to make a film that's for everyone. Because it's an origin story, it was like, I want to make a movie not just for fans, but for everyone. You don't need to know anything about Transformers and you can start watching this film and enjoy it.
That being said, in the trailer, we showcase a lot of comedy because we were having so much fun with these characters and with these actors that it just naturally made its way into the film. Optimus and Megatron become enemies, and so I wanted to make sure that the audience fell in love with them as brothers, as friends early on. By the end of this film, there's some serious stakes and there's the same amount of action and adventure that you come to expect from a Transformers film. It has that fun, light tone to it, but then it gets very real as well.
Well, that's what I wanted to ask about too, because in some ways the relationship is like Magneto and Charles Xavier a bit. So when we find them here, what is their dynamic like? Are they like brothers who butt heads?
Cooley: I think we treat them like brothers. They're from the same generation and they have a very tight relationship, like best friends. Something happens on their planet that they both have two different reactions to. That was important to me is to make sure that Megatron - D-16 - didn't come across come across as the villain just because he is the villain. I wanted to go into this pretending you've never seen Transformers before. If you were to watch this movie, you wouldn't know that he's going to become a bad guy. It's just, you're understanding why he's acting the way he does and then you just see this natural split that happens between the two of them, and it is a little bit tragic in a way.
I want to talk about a little bit about the voice cast too, specifically when I heard Brian Tyree Henry, and he has this natural gravitas in his voice. What did you find that he brought to the character?
Cooley: Oh, man. He brought so much. We spent a long time together just talking about D-16's work and how he is at the beginning versus where he becomes and how to treat that, and in a way that's not just "I'm a good guy, then I'm a bad guy." Understanding, making the audience go like, "oh, I get it. I understand why he feels that way. I would feel the same way," but the way that he reacts to it is slightly different.
"You just see this natural split that happens between the two of them, and it is a little bit tragic in a way.
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He takes it to a place, just a lot of anger, but you understand why. I felt like that was really one of the really important things for me, was making sure that the villain didn't feel like the villain from day one. That same thing for Brian. He brought that as well. He was saying, "we want to make this character feel very real and fully rounded."
Of course, exploring younger versions of all these characters is going to allow us to find new aspects behind them. Megatron's an obvious candidate for that, but is there anything about Optimus Prime that we haven't seen before that'll come through here?
Cooley: Yeah, I think like anybody else, there is a level of maturity that we don't have unless we've gone through something and that Orion Pax is definitely that. He's a character who's driven but maybe doesn't do it in the exact right way at first and he really discovers how to become Optimus and how to earn that. That was a big thing with working with Chris as well. Chris Hemsworth was like, having an arc to his character that's not just, "I don't know anything and now I'm the greatest guy in the world." It's like, he has to have more of something that is a little bit of a character flaw that he has to overcome.
Even listening to you saying that, and even watching in the trailer, I'm getting a little Thor from this. I don't know if I'm thinking too much about it, but is there some that in this character?
Cooley: Well, the one thing Chris does really well is play a hero. He just is heroic. He has that stance about him, but one thing that surprised me about Chris is how funny he is in real life. I was like, "oh, man, I want more of that in this movie." So he would take a pass on the lines and just kind of put himself into it and it makes Orion Pax really fun. Really, a lot of the comedy in the trailer came out of just his improv. Then in the whole film, just how he was bringing some lightness to the beginning of this character who's a little more younger in the sense that he doesn't have as many cares in the world as he does towards the end of the film when there's real stakes.
We've talked a lot about Optimus and Megatron, but I was also surprised in the trailer about how much of an ensemble movie it seems. Do we see a lot of Elita-One and Bumblebee in this?
Cooley: Elita-One is such a great character... It was important to me that Orion didn't just have all the answers. Nobody in the world just has all the answers and there's no perfect character. There needs to be push and pull from other characters. So it was a choice to have Elita-One be a part of this ensemble and B127 to help support the relationship for Orion and D-16. Elita, this movie can't happen without her. That's what I love about her character. She's not just there in the background to lean in and say funny things. She's a pivotal character in the storyline.
Is there anything in this in particular that might surprise your hardcore Transformers fans?
Cooley: I've heard this from people, that they get hit in nostalgia really hard. It reminds them of that feeling they had watching the original cartoon, as well as the movies of just the amount of action and adventure and the love for the characters. We're really taking these characters to heart and treating them with the respect that they deserve and knowing where they're going to end up. It's just seeing how they get there.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
