The Transformers: The Movie

one of the best animated movies out there!!! Hand drawn and cell painted animated masterpiece!

10/10
All Gold
This Classic
Timeless Epic
Is phenomenal,
The soundtrack is
Frickin Awesome
the movie itself is
Thrilling and exciting,
gets you in the
Feels big time and
It hits hard with the emotions
and the story and pacing is
amazing.
This blows
The Transformers
live action movie clean
out of the water,
no comparison actually,
as this movie is a
Million times superior
in every single way.
I absolutely
Love this movie 3,000
and I can not praise
it enough,
Because no matter
how many many times
I watch this Outstanding
Movie, every single time
I'm left feeling like
"I HAVE THE TOUCH,
I HAVE THE POWERrrr
YEAH".....

Classic!

The Michael Bay movies aren't enough like this. Not saying they needed 80's rock blasting through-out. But the humans should just be side characters like in this movie.

I was a bit late to the game, with this film - I saw it about 3 years after it was in the theaters and on public tv. (At the time it was on the air, I was dealing with things and was "why do I have to pay to see a cartoon I see for free?" Little did I know that after the movie, the next season of Transformers jumped to AFTER the movie. So, I had to play catch up for the first few weeks).
What I remember (other than the casting) from that first viewing was Stan Bush's "You Got the Power" theme song. One that I would record and would get A LOT of pay time in both my tape player, and later, my Ipods (and even made into my ring tone).

Flash forward 15 yrs later - I get the DVD and watch it, only to discover that >gasp< they said SHIT in the movie.
Yes, a cartoon made for kids dropped a S-Bomb. How did I miss that?! (Mind you, this was during an era where my brother and I LOVE to quote the art display dialogue from Beverly Hills Cop around our Mom). But to see a curse word in a kids movie - WOW.

Anyway, this is possibly the BEST of the Transformer films. While Bay's first film was able to give us an idea of what a Transformer would look like in the real world, it sort of pales when compared to similar effects used in the Iron Man CGI. But this one - it gave us so many elements of what we would see in other Bay films. (Including surprise casting).

Notorious as a big budget toy commercial, _The Transformers: The Movie_ is an incoherent mess. After a failed attack on Autobot City, a broken and battered Megatron is rescued by the planet destroyer Unicron, who then rebuilds Megatron as Galvatron and sends him on a mission to destroy the Autobot’s Matrix of Leadership. The film features an eclectic cast that includes Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles. And, the soundtrack is incredibly random and disconnected form the on-screen action (to the point of using “Weird” Al’s parody song “Dare to Be Stupid”). Still, the fight sequences are quite good and have a lot of energy to them. _The Transformers: The Movie_ has a lot of problems, but it’s also a fun adventure (even if it’s aggressively trying to sell toys).

If you were a little boy in the mid ‘80s like me, this flashy feature-length upgrade probably rocked your world. Not only does the movie bump the show's story forward by some twenty years, introducing new characters and aging familiar ones, it also matures its flavoring. _Transformers: The Movie_ is, thus, a weird marriage, pairing a newly jaded tone with the same empty, laser-strewn payoff we’ve seen a hundred times before. Where the villainous Decepticons were lucky to hit a barn door in the afternoon show, their movie counterparts fire with precision and murderous intent. That was a big shock for this wide-eyed seven year old, who had no idea so many of his favorites would meet violent (and visual) ends in the ensuing almost-ninety minutes. The common refrain is that this was a directive from Hasbro, anxious to promote a new wave of toys, and while there’s certainly some truth to that, the character churn wasn’t necessarily a bad move for the story. Even if it did traumatize a good part of its audience.

Having said that, I’m not sure what age range this is meant for. The dialogue seems advanced for young children, but the plot is too simple and shallow to interest adult audiences. Did any kids notice or appreciate the celebrity voice actors? Leonard Nimoy and Judd Nelson are behind the mic for the dueling leads, with Eric Idle spewing indecipherable gibberish in a supporting role and Orson Welles, less than a week from death, wheezing and grunting into a voice modulator as a planet-sized technological monster. At that age, the only one I might have recognized in-person was Mister Spock, but his voice work meant nothing, especially with that obscuring metallic twinge. Now, well into my forties, it’s clear that the more recognizable names were just cashing checks. By comparison, the original cast members are far superior.

At least everything looks great. The movie is a huge improvement in that respect; a marvelous example of stylish, glossy, cutting-edge animation that still stands tall today... so long as the “A” team is on the job. There’s a noticeable downgrade each time the star artists turn a less-inspiring scene over to their understudies. In a certain sense, though, both were playing with a stacked deck, as _The Transformers_ enjoys a large number of distinct, classic character designs. Suffice to say these are done justice, even when sent to a permanent (or, in some cases, semi-permanent) dirt nap. The music has been buffed too, with a big-time hair metal soundtrack that’s appropriately awesome, but the lyrics only match the content about half the time. Weird Al’s _Dare to be Stupid_, oddly enough, is a perfect choice for its bizarre sequence on a junk planet populated by distracted marauders.

My younger self probably assumed this would make more sense after I’d done some growing up. It doesn’t. The story leans on some unexplained nonsense about a glowing rock that forces the universe’s worst villains to spontaneously explode and/or pull their own limbs off, pays a lot of lip service to unity and balance, but apart from the harsher consequences, it doesn’t really do or say anything new. Effectively a triple-sized TV episode with better sights, more bangin’ tunes and a whole lot of casualties, the rule of cool can only carry this so far. I think calling it average is pretty generous.

I HATED HATED HATED this movie. I was 10 when it came out and my friend and I saw it on opening day. When Optimus Prime was killed (at the beginning of the film, no less!) I kept waiting for him to come back. And waiting. And waiting. Then the movie ended and my friend & I went home & couldn't believe he was dead. It was a very emotionally-scarring experience easily on par with "Old Yeller". As a result I've never watched it again. Turns out I wasn't the only one with a bad reaction to that. I've read since that Mattel killed Prime off in the movie as a way to introduce the new toy line. They were planning to do the same thing to Duke in a "GI Joe" animated movie that same year for the same reason, but the reaction from kids & parents to Prime's death was so negative, they scrapped the idea of killing Duke and never released the GI Joe movie to theaters. They rewrote/animated it and released in a "made-for-TV" movie instead. Oh, if only they had figured that out before releasing Transformers! Did they not do ANY test screenings of this film with kids (their main target audience) beforehand?

(sigh). OK. I'm good now. I've been waiting almost 30 years to vent that.

Just watched the Japanese dub for the first time. What a treat! The differences are fascinating and rather enjoyable.