From the toy action figures to feature films and television spanning animation and live action, the Transformers have over the decades sparked the imaginations of kids as well as those adults who have a sense of play and adventure.
The characters make for a stirring visual spectacle, literally transforming before our eyes. And that’s strikingly evident in the fully CG-animated Transformers One (Paramount Pictures), which hit theaters in September. However, the film goes well beyond spectacle by delving into what isn’t often visible to the naked eye–the soul and emotional makeup of the larger-than-life Transformers, thus bringing a new depth and dimension to the franchise. It’s almost as if the sensibilities of a Pixar movie have been woven into the Transformers cinematic fabric. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that the creative roots of the Transformers One director, Josh Cooley, are planted firmly in Pixar soil. Venturing beyond its eye candy norm and moving into empathetic territory, the Transformers movie now finds itself in the awards season conversation in the animation category–similar to how Pixar fare has fared over the years.
Cooley was with Pixar for 18 years before leaving and taking on Transformers One. He came aboard Pixar as a story intern right out of art school. Cooley moved up the ladder, including serving as a storyboard artist. He described that role as akin to being “kind of a mini-director, getting script pages and visualizing them.” He contributed to beloved films like The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Up. Cooley then shifted into other capacities, including co-writing Inside Out which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 2016. Four years later Cooley won a Best Animated Feature Oscar for Toy Story 4, his feature film directorial debut which he also co-wrote.
After wrapping Toy Story 4–experiencing what he called “the thrill” of working with a voice cast that included Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves, Tim Allen and Annie Potts–Cooley was trying to figure out what to do next. He decided to move on from Pixar, relocating from Northern California to Los Angeles in order to pursue new adventures in directing, including Transformers One, a project that was greenlit only to be delayed a protracted time by the pandemic before finally coming to fruition.
Cooley is a long-time Transformers fan, dating back to his childhood. Transformers One, however, had a story that appealed to him on a more profound level. Once he read the script for Transformers One, Cooley was hooked. “I liked where it was headed,” he recalled. “It had a very biblical feel to it for me–Cain & Abel-like, where brothers, in this case friends, become enemies.” The classically epic narrative conjured up parallels for Cooley to films like Ben Hur, Spartacus and The Ten Commandments.
Transformers One is an origin story, centering on the relationship between the two most iconic Transformers, Optimus Prime and Megatron. Tragically their close-knit bond unravels and they transform into fierce adversaries.
Cooley described the story as a blend of cool, epic and sci-fi yet at the core of the film is a human relationship. This highly relatable dynamic, observed Cooley, lent itself to a film that he felt had the potential to connect with not only fans of Transformers but also those who weren’t familiar with the characters. That appealed greatly to the director as did the challenge of striking a delicate balance of sorts. “I didn’t want it to be super intense all the time,” related Cooley whose preference was to ”ease into the world a little bit more,” deploying comedy as well as drama to tell the story. There’s a mesh of warmly comical, tug-at-the-heartstrings moments juxtaposed with the heartache of watching a deep friendship fall by the wayside and turn violent.
The audience comes in anticipating what it will get from a Transformers film, said Cooley, who added that a prime goal for him was to fulfill those expectations while also providing the unexpected. Thankfully the screenplay by Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari enabled him to thread that needle. Cooley felt simpatico with a story in which characters may be robotic on the outside, able to turn into assorted forms–even vehicular–but at the end of the day their relationship to one another is human.
Cooley credited the Transformers One voice cast–including Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key and Jon Hamm–with playing a key role in realizing the humanity of the characters.
While noting that the decision to depart Pixar–the place that nurtured him from the outset of his career–was difficult to make, the opportunity to tell the Transformers One story proved gratifying. And part of that gratification, he related, was hearing from some of the executives who were involved in past live-action Transformers films. Cooley shared that after seeing Transformers One, these execs told him they now feel the need to draw more emotion and character out of the robots in any future iterations of the Transformers saga.
As for his future, Cooley would love to keep directing while continually striving “to do something different. I don’t know what it is, perhaps some mix of animation with live action, like a hybrid.” Cooley noted that animation is advancing at a rapid rate and that “technology is allowing us to come up with anything we can imagine at this point.” Cooley related that celebrated VFX studio Industrial Light & Magic made him feel that the sky was the limit creatively on Transformers One, for which animation was created by hand within the CG process. ILM, he affirmed, could handle and deliver on anything he threw at them, exploring and realizing varied possibilities.
This is the fifth installment of our weekly 16-part The Road To Oscar Series of feature stories. Nominations for the 97th Academy Awards will be announced on Friday, January 17, 2025. The 97th Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 2, 2025.
