Transformers ONE Director Confirms New Movie’s Canon Status (Exclusive)

Transformers One does something the franchise hasn’t in decades, returns to its animated roots on the big screen. 1986’s Transformers: The Movie was the first in the franchise to debut, but in the time since then audiences have gotten used to the live-action versions that have been almost non-stop since 2007. Going back to this style for this Transformers movie wasn’t an accident though, and as you can see in the trailer it’s telling a different kind of story than other Transformers movies. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak with director Josh Cooley about the project ahead of the trailer’s debut where he revealed some of the secrets of the film, including the big canon question. Is this movie a fresh start? Is it canon with the live-action Transformers movies? Or is this sort of its own thing? 

“The answer is yes to all of the above,” Cooley revealed. ” Hasbro gave me this bible of the entire history of Transformers, which is, as you probably know, massive.’ And I was like, wow, I did not know it went this deep. It was like this Tolkien-esque scale…There’s obviously different variations of it. So we did our take on the origin, which is still staying true to the lore of Transformers, but it’s also, this is something we’ve never seen before on screen. So I wouldn’t say that this is a direct prequel to anything that’s been done with live-action ones, but it’s definitely its own story as well.”

Making the film stand apart from the live-action movies that have preceded it was a key component of why Cooley was interested in the project to begin with. Knowing that the franchise had veered into live-action for so long, Cooley reveals he wanted to know what would make this different from any of this, and finding out it had no humans in the cast and was set millions of years before Earth is even the planet we know it as was a big intrigue marker. Not only that but the setting made it something only animation could really get away with.

“The whole thing’s on Cybertron, which is their planet, completely made of living metal,” Cooley said. “What does that look like? That’s fascinating to me. And that’s something that pretty much is built for animation….I wanted to make it in a way that’s believable. It doesn’t have to be completely photorealistic like in the live-action ones. Having it be all CG gives us a little bit of leeway to take some artistic credit and do something a little different.”

A key component of design for Transformers One was that the characters not only be modeled after the original “G1” Transformers that fans of the classic toys and cartoons grew up with, but also that, in the spirit of the toys, the models didn’t cheat when transforming.

“This is one thing I could not believe we were able to do, and this all goes to the credit of our character designers and our art team, is that our characters transform one for one. So exactly like the toys,” Cooley revealed. “There’s no swapping out models or waving our hands or putting a lot of smoke in front of ’em. They actually transform the way they actually would. And the thing that got me excited about that is we are on Cybertron, which is full of Transformers, which to me means that a character that is a Transformer should be able to transform as simply as going from a walk into a jog. It is just natural for them. So I want it to look natural for every character, so there’s not a lot of extra effort put into it.”

In addition to that aspect of the characters, Cooley had another challenge for the animators and designers working on Transformers One, that at no time in the film’s action scenes should they be doing something that a human could also do. These are robots, and notably robots that have no reason to be in disguise, so they shouldn’t be moving like the inhabitants of a planet they don’t know exists.

“I said, everything has to be related to the fact that they’re robots and the fact that they’re Transformers,” Cooley said of his challenge. “So they can go into partial transformations. They can have their legs transform, but let their top half stay normal. There’s very cool things, very cool action that we can only do in this movie because of that. And so I wanted to really take advantage of that. And every step of the way was if it looked too similar to a human fighting, we would change it. So it’s like, how can this only be awesome for our movie?,

Cooley left us with one final tease for Transformers One, the character played by Steve Buscemi. The Big Lebowski actor is teased as being part of the cast in the trailer, but his voice isn’t heard.

“What can I tease? He’s fantastic and he’s a character that I think that fans will completely embrace, I’ll put it that way….This is a side of Steve Buscemi. I don’t think we’ve ever actually seen on screen now that they come to think about it. Yeah, he’s definitely, I don’t think I could say any more than that, but it was a joy working with him, with absolute joy and he’s going to make an impression.”

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi with Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm, Transformers One arrives in theaters on September 20.