Upcoming Untitled Animated Transformers Movie Will Be Animated By Industrial Light & Magic

While the Transformers franchise has had many cartoon iterations and live-action films, there hasn’t been an animated movie based around the Autobot/Decepticon war since 1986. Collider’s Steve Weintraub sat down with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who is the producer of the upcoming live-action film Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

In this interview, di Bonaventura revealed not only that he would be producing the upcoming untitled animated film, but that the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic aka ILM would be the animators of the project.

As mentioned before, the last animated Transformers film was Transformers: The Movie and it premiered in 1986. While the original Transformers series (also referred to as G1 in the fandom) holds a special place in fans’ hearts, it sounds like the style of the new film will be something else entirely. Weintraub asked “how the team was approaching the look of the new film and the style that it will be striving for.”

Di Bonaventura responded:

“Having seen probably four shots from it, you’ve never seen anything like it, I’ll say it that way. For sure, you’ll go, “Oh my God, it’s a whole thing.” I’m not sure if I’m supposed to divulge it, but I’m going to. ILM is doing the animation.”

The producer then continued, explaining why ILM is a great choice for animating their vision of Cybertron:

“You know, I think one of the difficulties in the past, for instance, in rendering Cybertron is, if you have to try to create the whole planet, it gets really expensive. So when you look at the intro in the beginning of Bumblebee, or in [Michael Bay’s] movies, we have different versions of it. This thing has to be a living, breathing environment, and so we have to create an environment that is unique to Cybertron, and given the history of Primus and all the things that go behind it, we’re allowed to inhabit, if you would, the planet in a way you couldn’t do it in live-action. Thankfully, ILM is a great partner in that.”

Much of the details surrounding this film is kept under wraps, but we do know it’s a prequel and it will be directed by Josh Cooley, who directed Toy Story 4. In this interview with Collider, di Bonaventura confirmed that the Transformers’ home planet Cybertron will be the setting for the movie:

“We debated a lot about it in live action, and it just was financially impossible to do, which is, the origin story of young Megatron and young Optimus. If you know the origin, they started as friends, and over time things devolved for them and they ended up on two sides. So we’re telling the young Optimus and the young Megatron story. We really are telling the origin story of all Transformers, both what they were at the beginning of it, to how they grow, to how they grow apart.”

The upcoming animated Transformers movie is set to hit theaters on July 19, 2024. In the meantime, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will release in theaters on June 9th of this year.

Where’s my Transformers fans out there?

Source: Collider