It is the year 2005. Twenty-one years after the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons resumed their
neverending war on planet Earth, the Decepticons have conquered the robots' home planet Cybertron.
After a surprise attack by the Decepticons, both factions wage a gruesome battle at Autobot City. In
the midst of the battle, Autobot leader Optimus Prime dies during his fight with Decepticon leader
Megatron. The Autobot Matrix of Leadership is then passed on to second-in-command Ultra Magnus.
Meanwhile, a badly-damaged Megatron is jettisoned by Starscream into deep space, where he encounters
the planet-eating robot Unicron and is reborn as Galvatron, the new Decepticon leader. With
Galvatron's reign on the rise and Unicron's imminent arrival within Cybertron's orbit, the Autobots
must act quickly and protect the Matrix or face total annihilation.
(Source: Anime News Network)
This movie is the definition of fun, I dare you to finish this movie and not be left with the dumbest grin of your life. I happened to stumble across this movie on a whim, thinking "hey, I remember watching Transformers as a kid, was that even an anime?" only to be extremely and pleasantly surprised, since all my previous nostalgia revisits turned out to be very disillusioning to say the least. So, let’s dig in on this forgotten milestone of my youth, and maybe even yours. What you definitely should not expect of this movie is a very complex and subtly built plot. “Transformers : THE movie” (big emphasis on “THE”) was originally meant to be a simple toy commercial to promote a new lineage of merchandise, which in retrospect explains a lot of weird creative decisions. However, it has this boldness that makes this movie so memorable, it's like they went "this is just a silly kids movie, let's do some fun shit with it". If you are not familiar with the well-known franchise of “Transformers”, it is basically a huge story about robots that are able to transform into vehicles and are fighting a generations-spanning war. You have the bad guys; The Decepticons, and the good guys; The Autobots. Now you’re essentially set to start this movie, because it is very adamant about disregarding the original series, which plays in the favor of first-time viewers. To not spoil too much about the movie, I will sum it up as such: A huge planet-eating orb called “Unicron” is threatening the existence of whatever robot life the producer decides to endanger and it is the Autobots’ task to defeat that giant, and so we embark on the heroes journey with many cool battles against Decepticons, weird planets with twisted justice systems and garbage dumps with robot space-pirates. If this premise doesn’t already sound stupidly awesome to you, please bear with me as I explain the merit of this movie in the next sections. For a spin-off of a children’s series this movie is very dark, even controversially so, with Hasbro receiving numerous complaints from parents about their kids’ trauma. It is quite understandable, that VERY bold move of ~!killing off the main cast of the original series in mere minutes.!~ That’s just not something you would see in a children’s cartoon. My favorite theory, although unlikely, is that the Japanese staff just thought they’d be making a feature film for some Japanese mecha franchise. The script is one of my favorite things about this movie, however cheesy, there is just something very memorable about it. After a second watch, I managed to memorize most of the dialogue. With absolute banger lines such as “Bah weep gra na weep ninni bong”, “Grimlock need new strategy”, and my personal favorite “I have got better things to do tonight than DIE”. The dialogue is just so weirdly snarky, you can’t hold it in contempt (~~for this court~~). The movie was originally released in Dub with some notable voice actors such as Orson Welles playing "Unicron" (his last role before death) img220(https://media2.giphy.com/media/KKWQqnT4rK73G/giphy.gif?cid=790b76115cb0e0506a464a36410bdfeb) I cannot talk about this movie without mentioning the animation, which is unbelievably good. It captures the chaos of battlefield perfectly and pretty much defines the unhinged nature of this movie from the get-go. If you are at all a fan of the 80s A E S T E T H I C, please do check this out. They decided to hire some very talented staff, most striking to me was Satoshi Urushihara, the soon to be key animator for the revolutionary “Akira” at the time. Even if you aren’t particularly a fan of the 80s look, I would say that the movie has aged extremely well, mainly due to the scarce presence of human characters, the designs of which were my main gripe with old anime when I was just being introduced to it. The movie is worth a watch for the cool animation alone, even if that’s not its only merit. webm(https://i.imgur.com/znCB2si.mp4) And now possibly the best thing about this movie: the soundtrack. I will unironically state that this is possibly my favorite soundtrack of an anime(?). The movie almost seems an overly long music video. Whenever there is something exciting happening, you’re damn near sure to have a kickass hard rock track playing over it. I just love the gritty sphere these songs give to the movie, such as the awesome rock rendition of the original Transformers theme song or even “Dare to be stupid” playing over the ridiculous pirate dance scene. You play each of these songs and you remember exactly at which point these are used in the movie, further adding to the memorability. If you are looking to watch an easy movie with lots of cool action and animation with an amazing OST, AND you’re always free for hilariously cheesy dialogue coming from actual professional actors, give this one a go.