‘Transformers One’ Director Josh Cooley & Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura Discuss Their Animated Origin Story

***This article was written for the November ’24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 344)***

Sentient robots in disguise are stomping into theaters this fall with Transformers One. Billed as the first all-CG-animated Transformers movie, the Paramount release tells the backstory of how two bestie worker bots, Orion Pax and D-16, became future mortal enemies named Optimus Prime and Megatron billions of years before the live-action franchise took off.

Directed by the Academy Award-winning Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) and shepherded to the big screen by Transformers super producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Transformers One takes place ages ago on the machine planet of Cybertron and reveals the turbulent events that took Orion Pax and D-16 from friends to foes and spawned the rise of the deadly Decepticons.

‘You can turn the sound off on this movie and clearly read what they’re thinking. Going back to the original G1 designs, which are pretty much just a flat metal face, it was important that things were believable.’

— Director Josh Cooley

Cooley (The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Brave, Inside Out) is a former Pixar story artist and director who answered the call to helm this heroic origin story for Hasbro and Paramount, and the impressive results enter that rarefied air of instant sci-fi classics.

“When I read the first draft of the script, the tone was a little different,” Cooley tells Animation Magazine. “It was a bit lighter and more cartoony. The thing that was there always was this idea of going from best friends to antagonists. I always love villains that are more complex. With Transformers, it’s always been, ‘I’m the good guy. I’m the bad guy. Let’s beat it out.’”

An Epic Bots Tale

“There’s a real arc to this relationship where you see them really working together and you like them together. Then it would be a real heartbreak once that relationship falls apart. To me, this could be kind of like those huge epics I love watching like Spartacus or Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments — these massive, epic stories with a real personal relationship at the core.”

In addition to the striking, color-splashed CG animation provided by Industrial Light & Magic, Transformers One is blessed with a superstar vocal cast that includes Chris Hemsworth (Orion Pax, a.k.a. Optimus Prime), Brian Tyree Henry (D-16, a.k.a. Megatron), Keegan-Michael Key (B-127, a.k.a. Bumblebee), Scarlett Johansson (Elita-1), Laurence Fishburne (Alpha Trion), Jon Hamm (Sentinel Prime) and Steve Buscemi (Starscream).

Di Bonaventura is a seasoned warrior in the Hollywood trenches who was associated with a multitude of blockbuster franchises, such as Harry Potter and The Matrix, during his time as an elite Warner Bros. executive, before setting up shop at Paramount to lead the Transformers charge.

“This origin story is so damn compelling,” he says. “In our business, so often we claim that these action pictures are character-based. But this story is utterly character-based. The plot is two best friends who become mortal enemies and change the destiny of Cybertron. It’s a classic plot, and what you quickly realized was we’ve been limited in live action because every time a CG character talks it costs a lot of money. So we’ve always had to be conscious of how much robot time there is. Here, we had absolutely no restriction. What’s great about it is that we were able to really get in and explore robot characters in a way we’ve never been able to.”

“I loved Toy Story 4, and trying to make the fourth movie was a hell of a challenge and Josh crushed it,” says the producer. “When I met with him, he was a die-hard Transformers fan, and he got what we were trying to do. And he also had a personal story with his brother that had relevance to what we were doing. They grew up best friends, and now Josh is in the entertainment world doing art, and his brother is a cop who has a very different worldview. The high bar we had here was I wanted us to feel bad for both characters. It’s really over their philosophies that they become apart. Essentially, Megatron is a pro-authoritarian character and Optimus is pro-democracy.”

One minor controversy surrounding Transformers One was replacing the deep, mellifluous pipes of Peter Cullen with Chris Hemsworth, the MCU’s God of Thunder, to voice Orion Pax/Optimus Prime for this prequel set thousands of centuries in Cybertron’s past.

“Peter Cullen is the Optimus Prime of my childhood that I grew up with,” says Cooley. “From Day One, it was something that kept me up at night. How do we do a younger version that feels right? I think it was Lorenzo that brought up Chris, and I took a listen to his voice and could hear he had the depth and the timbre. So we talked about him doing an American accent so it felt like the character that would become Optimus. Chris is really funny and charming, and he brought that into the voice from the very beginning. As he got toward the end of the script and started to become Optimus a bit more, I could see in his physical performance he was standing up straighter and started getting the tempo of Cullen’s performance to the point where I got goosebumps in the booth. It was really fun working with him on that, and I’m still blown away.”

Calling All Autobots

Acting as a dynamic introduction to the Transformers universe for virgin fans, but also intent on satiating the desires of legions of Autobot and Decepticon faithful, Cooley walked a tricky tightrope to balance those two vital components.

Engaging music elevates Transformers One far beyond just a simple animated iteration from the multibillion-dollar transmedia franchise, and Cooley was determined to fortify the film with an appropriate soundtrack, even choosing the perfect end-credits tune.

“The score was written by Brian Tyler, who I absolutely adore. He’s a mad genius. He’s a great DJ and musician, and he can play every instrument. I just knew he was going to be the only one who can create a song that has the soul of the movie in it. He wrote and performed in that song and uses elements of the score, so it’s a song that can only come from this movie, which I absolutely love. I love it and listen to it constantly in the car and can’t wait for it to get out there.”

ILM’s pageantry of pixels on display for this $147 million production is something audiences have never quite witnessed before, with its palpable metallic texturing, modulated facial expressions, fantastic world-building and eye-pleasing color palette.

“The faces are very complicated in the live-action movies, and you can see every nut and bolt moving around and plates moving over each other,” Cooley explains. “I wanted to make sure it was clear and simple in terms of their expressions. You can turn the sound off on this movie and clearly read what they’re thinking. Going back to the original G1 [Generation 1] designs, which are pretty much just a flat metal face, it was important that things were believable. It’s not super realistic, it’s not super artsy. The lighting is real. The physics are real. The reflections are real. It was finding that balance. I wanted to make sure that things didn’t get pushed too far or too cartoony.

“The color theme came out of knowing that we’ve only ever seen Cybertron where it was dying and falling apart,” the director explains. “This is Cybertron when things were going fine. And for me, that’s a huge thing, because when they start fighting each other they’re fighting over the planet. The planet is the thing. It’s like a character; it needs to be beautiful. I always say, ‘Do I want to go to that land in a theme park as an audience member?’ So it was about not making it just a grey or silver ball of stuff. I looked at a lot of natural metals on Earth, and they’re not all just silver. Like onyx is super black and reflective. We used all that as inspiration to make this world feel alive and really rich.”

Metallic Magic

Echoing those sentiments, di Bonaventura was attuned to Cooley’s love of Transformers G1, and that had a huge impact on the movie’s overall design concept.

“At the same time, the complexity that Michael Bay brought to the world of Transformers — you can’t just jettison that, because then they become boring,” di Bonaventura adds. “So it’s sort of a combination of the two. The look of the picture is utterly gorgeous, and ILM did a phenomenal job right from the get-go, in part because all the artists we were working with are die-hard Transformers fans, so they put their souls into this.

“Our objective was that this is a vibrant planet that actually transforms itself all the time. So it has an interesting aesthetic because you can never be exactly sure if something’s about to change. At the same time, we wanted it to be a colorful world, not because it’s an animated movie, but because why wouldn’t Cybertron be a colorful world and have a unique landscape and a unique palette? Too often planets are like desertscapes. We wanted to do the opposite.”

Cooley’s experience on this ambitious creative enterprise left him transformed as well.

“I loved working with Lorenzo on this film,” he says. “I learned so much from him. He’s done over 100 movies, and they’re amazing films that he’s been a part of. He had such a great outlook and not just from a filmmaker or storytelling perspective but also as somebody who’s been part of every single Transformers film. That was extremely helpful, and it was great to have him as a partner.”

Paramount Pictures releases Transformers One in theaters on September 20. The film is a presentation of Paramount Animation and Hasbro.