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The new animated Transformers movie is ostensibly about the early lives of the characters from Hasbro’s 1980s toy line, but it also may be about a class uprising and civil rights. I think Transformers One even takes a jab at 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 is to say, Transformers One isn’t exactly as hokey as it looks. Sure, it’s basically a kids’ movie, but much like the Transformers cartoons of the ’80s, it does have a message.
Or, at least director Josh Cooley thinks so. Cooley, who won an Oscar for his work on Toy Story 4, left Pixar on March 13, 2020, to make Transformers One. He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly.
Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”
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 what, exactly, led him to the Transformers movie he made and how he ended up having Scarlett Johansson as the voice of a robot right after she went toe-to-toe with OpenAI.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: So, you won an Oscar with Pixar, built your career there. What was it about a Transformers movie that persuaded you to make this shift?
JOSH COOLEY: Well, first of all, Pixar was my first job.
You were a storyboard artist, right?
Yeah. First I was an intern in the story department, and then I became a storyboard artist and then just kind of worked my way up. I just kept wanting to keep going. So after Toy Story 4, I was like, “Well, I just worked on a Toy Story movie,” you know what I mean?
Yeah, “What now?”
Like, how do you top that? So I read the script for Transformers One, and I was like, oh, being that it's an origin story, it was unlike anything that Transformers had done before. I love the idea of the relationship between these characters. I was like, “I have to do this.”
The most recent Transformers movies have been a combination of live-action and CG characters. The Transformers: The Movie, in 1986, was animated by hand. Transformers One feels like a return to animated Transformers, but it was all done with CG animation.
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Yeah, this is the first time it’s ever been done on a computer for the big screen. It’s a completely different style.
I ask because there’s a lot of talk about AI automating jobs. It’s happening in the video game industry. The Animation Guild is currently looking for protections from AI encroachment in their contract negotiations with Hollywood studios. Do you think people will see that this is CG animated and start thinking computers will just be animating these things on their own one day? I know that sounds hyperbolic, but …
No, no. Even before AI, people thought that. It was like, “Oh, you just hit the Cool button.”
Right. Like all you had to do was [makes button-clicking gesture] “Make it shiny.”
Exactly, but the opposite of that. It’s like saying the pencil draws by itself. If we’re doing CG, everything has to be modeled and textured and lit. Not that I want audiences to be thinking about that.
Yeah, obviously.
But the amount of work that goes into it is kind of staggering.
What do you think about AI’s impact on animation, broadly?
It's fascinating, because it definitely can [impact animation], and it's still growing, still changing, so it can affect everything at some point. The question I have about it, or the thought I have about it, is that you still have to feed AI off of something else. So it's kind of regurgitating something that’s already done. It's not fair to the people who did that thing. So I think that's kind of a huge problem where it's not … I dunno, I dunno if it's stealing, I don't know what it is.
Right.
Studios are always going to want to make everything faster, cheaper, and better. But the quote is, you can only pick two. I don't know if it's going to make things faster or better or cheap.
As an animator yourself, does it feel like theft to know that one day someone could just type “Toy Story” into an AI generator and animate something you worked a long time on?
It’s really weird. But also, there’s not going to be a human quality to it. You can already tell a computer, “Have this character walk from here to there,” and it’ll do it and it’ll look great, but it won’t have personality to it. Or maybe it can now.
Personality is the next thing AI gets, right? I was thinking about this watching One since Scarlett Johansson voices a robot, Elita-1, and she just spent some time pushing back against what she believed was the use of her voice for OpenAI’s chatbot. Was she already cast when all of that went down?
I want to say we had already started recording her. I'm pretty sure we had.
It’s kind of ironic.
Scarlett and I never discussed it. We didn't need to, but I was a million percent on her side.
And now she’s in a movie voicing a robot who is, essentially, a mine worker who discovers she’s been exploited. She’s also, perhaps contrary to a lot of previous Transformers properties, a femme-coded character.
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Transformers in the ’80s, well everything in the ’80s, was like, boys do this, girls do that. And so Transformers had two female characters, right?
Yeah, Arcee and Elita?
So, when I read the script, I was like, “Oh, I love that she's being brought forward. And that was one of the things I talked with Scarlett about, was how we can bring her forward even more, make her not just a sad character or somebody who leans in and has a funny line, but actually is part of the story. I'm very happy about that.
I feel like there are some Easter eggs to other previous iterations of Transformers. Like, Megatron’s style seemed more like the cartoon. Also, wasn’t he originally a gun? Like, before someone realized that was a bad idea. It seems like his look was a nod to that, or am I reading too much into it?
No, no. We definitely started from the first generation cartoon on this film and built from that. But there is some weird stuff in Transformers. It doesn't quite make sense at all. Megatron would change into a gun and then somehow change size. Get smaller so that other bots could shoot him. It's like, “What is happening?” It made more sense to us to make him a tank.
There’s a line from Sentinel Prime where he says something along the lines of “the truth is what I make it.” Not to make everything about the current political climate in the US, but that felt pointed, especially since he says it twice.
So, the relationship between Optimus and Megatron is the thing that made me want to make the movie but also was my emotional core for making all my decisions on the film. When I'm directing something, I have something that I'm emotionally attached to, so that when an artist is asking, “What does this design look like?” I can go point him somewhere that's emotional. So that was always the core of it. Then as we were working on this film, I mean, actually every film I've worked on, it's interesting to see how much of the surrounding world's put into the movie.
You can't help it sometimes because you're living it. And this movie definitely had that.
Are there any specific examples?
Well, I don't want to say exactly. I want people to watch the movie and then kind of put that together themselves. I wanted to force people to think about it, and I hadn't really thought about specifics. It wasn't like, “This character is based on this character.”
So, as a viewer, I kind of almost saw a queer allegory in the story. There’s at least one part when the Transformers talk about being born with the ability to become whatever they want to be, but that gets taken away …
I think it's not just that. I think it could be applied to anything where somebody is trying to tell you what to do. Not just in this country, but other countries. It's everywhere.
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It's not just happening today. It's been happening forever. And it's one of the things that really pisses me off. It really pisses me off when people tell you how to live your life when what you're doing is not affecting somebody else at all.
I feel like this movie is trying to say something about power. Is it a balancing act to do that in a movie that’s essentially for kids?
If I had come into the movie thinking I got to tell a story about this relationship but then also this society and all that stuff, I think I would've been just overstimulated by all of it. But I will say, the first draft was just more about friends-to-enemies.
Then you just kind of keep reiterating, and it's almost like painting a painting. You're adding these layers that maybe you didn't anticipate, but then it pulls everything together.
Obviously, Michael Bay is a producer and was making Transformers movies for a long time. Did you work with him at all to keep his visual language?
He was able to see a version of the movie at the perfect time when he gave notes and we were able to implement it. Same with [producer Steven] Spielberg as well, which is amazing.
Recently there was news that Bay is looking into making a Skibidi Toilet franchise. I don’t know if you’re familiar …
I saw one image from it, and then I was like, “What is this?” And somebody said, “This is the biggest thing on YouTube.” But I don't know what that is.
OK. So my next question about whether or not that’s your next movie is out the window.
Skibidi Toilet One?
Ha! Yeah. Do you know what you want to do next?
I don't know for sure. I've learned, and I've talked about what a sequel could be for this film, and there's obviously more story to tell. So there's that, but I don't know. I'm also open to live-action, animated, or hybrid movies. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the movie that made me want to become a filmmaker—not just an animator, but a filmmaker. So I'd love to do something like that. Or if the story is good enough and it happens to be done with sock puppets, I'll do that too. You know what I mean? I just want to make something that's thought-provoking and entertaining. Most importantly, entertaining.
Is it a challenge to make a film that’s essentially about toys? Barbie did it, but there’s not as much lore, I guess, around Barbie.
Well, the thing that's different with the Barbie movie, which I love, was that the characters were still toys. With Transformers, yes, the whole brand was created from the toy first, and then everything kind of came off of that, but I never thought of it that way while making the movie. It’s not a movie about toys. It's a movie about an alien planet. They're a different race that happens to be robots. I know it's a very specific thing, but it makes a huge difference, because I never wanted to think of them as being dismissed as toys.
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Yeah, 30 years ago I never would’ve thought about the Transformers being part of a class struggle. They’re miners; they’re being pushed to work long hours.
I was thinking about this recently, a lot of ’80s cartoons like GI Joe and He-Man, at the end they would always have a lesson, right? “Knowing is half the battle” or something. They were trying to infuse some real lessons into the shows. GI Joe …
… Is actually about the military-industrial complex?
It’s like sci-fi. You think of GI Joe as the army, but it’s not.
I still have this vague memory of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles telling me about road safety.
It is weird how these things just come and form an entire childhood.
There’s a lot of talk of franchises and rebooting. Transformers is a property that’s been around for a while. Is there anything current you can think of that could be a franchise 30 years from now?
Yeah, that's a great question. I wish there was more new stuff that was coming out now that would be something that we can point to. Or that's probably going to last.
Maybe it’s Skibidi Toilet.
Yeah, maybe it’s Skibidi Toilet.
