WesternAnimation Suprisingly Good
I liked Transformers: Prime. I liked Transformers: Beast Wars. I decided to check the original cartoon and found it lacking countless ways. So imagine my surprise when I found myself really liking the movie.
True, the story is simple and the cast is rather flat (and overblown, probably to sell toys). But if all you want is TF action movie, then it's a lot of fun. The animation is quite stunning after all these years, soundtrack top notch and without wishing to spoil, few scenes really blew my mind what they were allowed to do in the 80s.
If you ever been curious about G1 transformers, but cartoon bored you, give this a try.
WesternAnimation Dated and formulaic, but still enjoyable.
The animated Transformers movie is one big gloryfest of 80's camp, an over-the-top presentation of hair metal, bright colors, and popular toylines wrapped around The Hero's Journey. This isn't a condemnation of it, however; quite the opposite. It's fun precisely for these features, a classic Guilty Pleasure for viewers both in Transformers fandom and out.
TFTM shakes up the setting of Transformers by rotating in a new cast for Season 3 (often by removing the old cast, sometimes with a fusion cannon) and sets the scene for a rookie hero to be taken through a path that leads through most of the classic Hero's Journey steps. The mix of characters sometimes borders on the excessive, but by centering focus on Hot Rod—by design, no doubt—the film manages to play all of these characters against each other and have a few enjoyable scenes along the way, such as a memorable moment where the Dinobots loudly disrupt the proceedings of a Kangaroo Court.
The animated movie certainly has a lot going for it—its animation quality was the highest the franchise had seen to that point and would see for years after, and the music was classically 80's, featuring Lion and Stan Bush's music backing a lot of Autobots, Rock Out! moments. "The Touch," arguably the most iconic song of the movie, would go on to become a Transformers fandom touchstone as a result of it being played during the climactic battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron, and later Hot Rod and Galvatron. The movie itself would be the source of dozens of Homages down the line in later Transformers media.
Its flaws are inherent to its design; the Hero's Journey is well known, and its cast is made up of new and largely Flat Characters that don't receive much of an arc during the course of the movie. Ultra Magnus is a stolid supporter, Springer is the wise-cracking rogue, Kup is the old mentor type, and so on. Only brash hero Hot Rod gets much development, which is unfortunate; at times the cartoon managed to do a lot with a 22-minute episode, and the movie only does marginally more with almost four times as much runtime.
It's corny, cheesy, and not for everyone but TFTM has aged surprisingly well. Still, for those who want an action film for the kids or pine for the nostalgia of that era, it still functions.note
"STARSCREAAAM!"
WesternAnimation A complete mess, but a fun mess
I first saw this film when Cybertron was airing, and I rewatched it a lot. Now that I'm an adult, I actually still have a lot of fun with it, and have grown to appreciate how it expanded the Transformers lore (because I don't have much nice to say about the original cartoon), but it is the kind of movie where you can't think about it too much.
We get this great scene at the start where Unicron destroys an entire planet to establish himself as the ultimate threat, but his first tenure as Big Bad is meh. The plot concerns the Autobots wanting to take back their home planet Cybertron after the Decepticons fully conquered it, but Unicron did not conquer Cybertron, Megatron did. This was before Unicron became Transformers Satan, so he has no connection to the main cast and is a Generic Doomsday Villain. Unicron's reason for bothering with the cast is the Matrix, the existence of which makes less sense if you know there's a cartoon connected to the movie instead of it being a stand-alone story (like I thought it was as a kid) because it never got mentioned before and scenes of Optimus opening his chest prior were Matrix-less. Hot Rod, the new hero, accidentally gets Optimus killed to his immediate regret that you think would be part of a character arc but is instead forgotten about and doesn't do much except give kids mourning Prime's death a reason to hate the poor guy.
Unicron butts into the plot by turning Megatron into Galvatron and tells him to destroy the Matrix, which entails killing the Autobots, the thing he was already going to do. The Autobots find out Unicron exists when he eats their moon bases and decide to go to Cybertron, the place they were already going to go to as per their end goal. Galvatron arrives and becomes the main source of conflict again as Unicron just sits in space while Galvatron does all the work. The Autobots get separated on two planets that could have been a single planet as they both have the cast meet new characters who give them a method off the planet and remind them that Unicron exists because they forgot.
The Autobots decide Unicron is relevant again, who forgets that he can eat planets and transforms to punch Cybertron and start a big battle the main cast ignores by immediately going inside Unicron. They run around inside Unicron, probably realizing they never made a plan to kill him, with Daniel finding the residents of the moon bases who were kind of pointless because the Autobots needed to learn about Unicron a second time, and Hot Rod runs into Galvatron with the Matrix, who proposes an alliance until Unicron tells him to kill Hot Rod and he's suddenly on board with the idea to remind you that this film's villain is really the Deception leader because Unicron feels disconnected from the conflict. Hot Rod uses the Matrix to get a new body in a scene so vague that it really confused me as a kid, defeats Galvatron, and then the Matrix with its poorly-explained powers immediately kills Unicron and the Autobots have control of Cybertron again, which would have happened even without Unicron because the Decepticon leader being thrown into space would have done a number on them anyway.
So yea, it's a mess with stuff that just kind of happens and seemingly-major characters who don't do anything (I forgot that Blurr and Wheelie existed as a kid, and Scourge and Cyclonus could have been fused into a single character), but it is very fun. Bumblebee is much, much better, though.