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The Transformers: The MovieTowards the end of his career, Orson Welles would take on any messed-up scheme that came his way providing there were a few dollars attached to it. Besides advertising Bird's Eye frozen peas on British television and narrating two albums by heavy metal band Manowar, Welles appeared in all manner of schlock to finance his own pictures. So rather than taking his final bow in a movie worthy of his talents, the creator of Citizen Kane bade farewell to the world with a turn as a talking planet in The Transformers: The Movie.
Embarrassing as this might sound, Welles could have had it a lot worse. For not only did he make inferior films (see Bert I Gordon's Necromancy and/or the Pia Zadora vehicle Butterfly), but Nelson Shin's animated movie is much better than you might either remember or imagine. Indeed, far from being a straightforward toy picture made to shift merchandise, The Transformers: The Movie (aka The Transformers, aka Matrix Forever) is an early stab at American anime, complete with fine direction from an important animation pioneer and a good script by a bona fide television stalwart.
A bridge between the second and third series of TV series 'Transformers', Shin's feature film finds the war between the Decepticons and Autobots (for those not in the know, good robots who transform into motor vehicles and bad robots who transform into planes respectively) having escalated to the point where it has engulfed their homeworld of Cybertron. With the planet now in the hands of the bad guys and the Autobots without their great leader Optimus Prime (Cullen, the voice of Eeyore in Disney's 'The New Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh'), things look pretty dire for our heroes. And they seem even worse when three of their toughest foes unite with Unicron (Welles), an awesome mechanical creation prone to eating planets.
The film was dismissed by many as an 80-minute advert for Hasbro's hugely popular range of Transformers toys. However, it's important to stress that this film is far removed from those calculating and gaudy Care Bear/My Little Pony movies that used to appear in cinemas during the school holidays. In fact, The Transformers: The Movie marks the moment when the primitive Panavision animation of US Saturday morning cartoons collided with the advanced anime of 'Gatchaman' (repackaged and released in the West as 'Battle Of The Planets'). The man responsible for this groundbreaking blending of styles is Nelson Shin, a respected animator (he worked for DePatie-Freleng, on the Pink Panther animation) who facilitated this great leap forward by opening a studio in South Korea. Shin's Akom Production Co is now famous as the home of 'The Simpsons'.
The Transformers: The Movie is also elevated by a script that is, by turns, dramatic, amusing and an apparent send-up of 1980s action cinema. The screenwriter is one Ron J Friedman, and the chances are that if you've watched any television over the past 40 years, you'll be familiar with his oeuvre. The author of scripts for 'The Dukes Of Hazzard', 'Happy Days' and 'The Odd Couple', Friedman's feature-length efforts (principally the misleadingly monikered The Best Movie Ever Made) haven't reflected the quality of his small-screen work. With 'The Transformers', however, he found a good, if rather bizarre, outlet for his abilities as a writer of comedy and melodrama.
As for the final feather in The Transformers' chrome-coated cap, look no further than a cast that features such respected voiceover talents as Casey Kasem and Scatman Crothers (who spoke for Hong Kong-Phooey when he wasn't singing or starring in The Shining) together with the familiar tones of Leonard Nimoy and Eric Idle. As for Welles' swansong, it's not at all bad. Indeed, since he had a huge appetite and was almost the size of a planet at the time he passed away, you could say that Orson had a unique insight into the plight and character of Unicron.
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