Long before Hollywood-made video game adaptations were the order of the day, in 1994, as many as two films based on Street Fighter II. Capcom’s work swept arcades around the world, to the point of promoting two simultaneous productions: one of American origin and the other Japanese, the original company being Japanese. The American, entitled Street Fighter: The Last Battlearrived at Christmas with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and was a film disastrous enough to become a cult title. The Japanese, more precisely titled Street Fighter II: The Moviehad been released internationally that same summer. It was much better received, and interestingly enough, it was an animated film.
THE Street Fighter animated by Gisaburô Sugi has been considered for years as one of the best films based on a video game, on the fringes of a state of opinion that rejected these industrial tricks with the most furious reproaches. Before the Super Mario Bros. from Illumination or the series The Last of UsThere used to be talk of a curse that prevented video games from being released in theaters in a solvent manner, without irritating players and critics. Street Fighter II was an exception from the beginning, according to an emerging judgment that animation was the most appropriate medium for bringing pixels to other types of screens. Faced with the ridicule of Street Fighter: The Last Battle the formal solidity of Street Fighter II and its fidelity to the original characters. This approach is still found, 30 years later, in the gigantic franchise of Transformers.
Transformers was born in 1983 as a Hasbro toy line, which, like GI Joe —the other major license of this multinational, inaugurated in the 60s as a male competitor of the barbie Mattel, soon expanded to other media. Comic books, trading cards, but also an animated series and its corresponding film, directed in 1986 by Nelson Shin. The eternal battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons, alien robots capable of camouflaging themselves into vehicles recognizable by humans, has forged a solid alliance fandom Long before the 21st century, they wanted to adapt their stories to live action. Now, with the premiere of Transformers Onethe saga wants to go back in time, and return to the animation of the 80s, with the certainty that those same live-action films ended up producing boredom. Not going to the bizarre extremes of Street Fighter: The Last Battlebut not because Michael Bay didn’t try.
Animation as legitimation
Attempts to adapt video games through animation generally work well, with the obvious spike in Esoteric in 2021. This Netflix series exploits a source as successful and widespread as League of Legendsand plans to launch its second season in November. It has received applause from audiences, also as part of the growing roots that NPR animation is enjoying in Hollywood: that is, Non-photorealistic renderingwhich combines 2D and 3D finishes. As we continue to trace the understanding of animation as a means of revitalizing an intellectual property following what has been Street Fighter IINPR school is a must. It hatched in 2018 with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Versegiving Sony’s superhero productions a prestige that its other films don’t even have –Venom, Morbius, Madame Web–, and that Spider-Man himself, in live action, has also lost within the Marvel Universe.
Beyond its sequel Crossing the MultiverseNPR has served to legitimize other brands. In 2022, it has taken up the bruised legacy of Shrek to give it a superb facelift with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Last year, the same Paramount that teamed up with Hasbro to continue developing Transformers as a film franchise released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Case. With NPR’s encouragement, Puss in Boots and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have demonstrated a compelling and critically acclaimed revolutionary appeal. Changing the way you animate has nothing to do with writing good screenplays, of course, but somehow it seems that this formal audacity brings with it a new energy, one that completely defines the films. Making them more agile, fun, and exciting.
So NPR has had no choice but to become a fetish. It has acquired such respectability in so few years that part of the industry believes that it is enough to embellish its projects with a breath of cosmetic fresh air. There is no better example than Wish: The Power of Wishesreleased last year to celebrate Disney’s centennial. wish He resorted to a crappy NPR, convinced that it would be enough to disguise a purely corporate product, dedicated to selling the brand through prototypical stories and cameos. Transformers OneIn short, it doesn’t use NPR animation – it opts for more conventional digital creations – but it fits into all the logic described. As with Ninja Turtlesthe animation is heard in Transformers One as a colorful strategy to freshen up a certainly burnt saga.
Since 2007, seven films have been released. Transformers live action. Five of them directed by Michael Bay, featuring Bumblebee in 2018 a turning point towards which Transformers One it continues to adjust. When Bay was in charge, the films Transformers It was quite far from the childish vocation of toys, comics and previous animated productions. These were histrionic, grotesque, purely authorial films – by an author as singular as Bay – who since Bumblebee They would try to bring the waters back into their channel in a smooth transition to family consumption. The recent premiere of The awakening of the beastswhich takes place in the 90s to introduce the Maximals (Animal Transformers), was the most decisive effort in this sense, due to the way it removed all the problematic points of the films to offer their most refined version.
Transformers One is a prequel set on Cybertron, the home planet of the Transformers. It tells the story of how Orion Pax and D-16 became the heroic Optimus Prime and the evil Megatron, going from allies to bitter enemies. There are no humans in sight in the plot, and its development goes back entirely to the animated Transformers of 40 years ago. The saga has returned to its roots, with only one additional ingredient that the industry of the 80s had not yet mastered.
The eternal showcase
Anti-capitalist theorist Mark Fisher was deeply disturbed by the saga. toy story. Especially because of the presence in his films of Mr. Potato, one of the oldest toys of the same Hasbro that manages the Transformer legacy. “Digitized versions of old toys appear alongside new fictional toys,” he writes in Flat constructions about toy story. “A fictionalization that has less to do with an inaccessible fantasy character and more to do with the opposite: the toys that appear on the screen are immediately available as consumer objects when leaving the cinema. It is an increasingly familiar pattern: the film functions as an advertisement for toys, which function as an advertisement for it in an ever-tightening spiral.
It turns out that the director of Transformers One is Josh Cooley, a Pixar veteran who released 2019’s toy story 4 with an excellent commercial reception. For some reason, Paramount thought Cooley was the best person to pilot Transformers in a particularly delicate phase of the phenomenon, both at the level of the saga and of Paramount itself. The major Hollywood is managing its partnership with Hasbro through the most precarious moments in its history – it was on the verge of being absorbed by Sony, only to be dumped in exchange for a complicated merger with Skydance – while Transformers must reinvent itself as quickly as possible in a sustainable manner, after The awakening of the beasts It wasn’t as good as it should have been at the box office.
Enough The awakening of the beasts hinted in its post-credits scene at a future film that would bring together the two major Hasbro brands that Paramount usually exploits: Transformers with GI Joein a crossing This has been suggested for years, but it will try to be put into practice as the desperation for media relevance grows. Cinematic universes, in this sense and no matter how much superheroes may face their decline, seem to continue to be the best option, as does the preemptive planning of narrative cycles: Transformers One It is billed as the first of three films, inaugurating a story that would end with the robots being exiled to Earth. Transformers One So it’s not so much a film as an incombustible advertisement for new products. Romanticized toys to continue consuming endlessly.
This artifact-character, where promotion merges with fiction, corresponds to the central features of the film. The animation is solid – it does not need the NPR fetish to maintain its own expressiveness, very happy in particular in the geographical description of Cybertron and the omnipresent transformations – but the plot could not be more formal and predictable. Made with a humor of an indeterminate audience, between the adolescent and the childish – that is to say the humor of Marvel studios -, the entirety of Transformers One It’s aseptic and vulgar. There’s a noticeable effort to minimize any stridency and ensure that the entertainment flows in an orderly fashion, portraying a kind of ghostly, happy place that harks back to Saturday morning cartoons. Those shows were usually broken up by commercials selling cereal or plastic versions of Transformers. The real originality of Transformers One Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that it offers exactly the same thing without separate ad breaks.
