The Transformers: The Movie (1986)

Best movie ever!

Absolutely brilliant

Blistering performances.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I saw this movie for the first time as a 7 year old, maybe younger, in the early 1990's and it was an amazing experience for a kid my age. I remember the sounds, the colors, the shapes, everything about the animation and the audio brings me back to that place. The soundtrack by Vince DiCola is fantastic and has not aged a day. What I really love about this movie is that is does not have that "dated" feel at all, every time I have watched it as an adult it still impresses and intrigues me. The voice of Unicron played by Orson Wells is really a treasure as he passed away shortly after the film was released. The new Transformers movies have nothing on this classic. The 1986 Animated Transformers movie inspired kids all over the world and provided awesomeness to everyone who ever watched it.

This film is overall an 8 - great.The soundtrack is great, the voice acting is good, the plot is mostly engaging and the animation is very well done. The only issues I can think of is that the action isn't very entertaining, but this couldn't be helped. It was the best they could do for the 80s. And there is one annoying character, but mercifully he's not in the film often. Overall, this is a great flick worth a viewing because it's genuinely well done. For a first attempt at a full length Transformers film, it's not bad at all.

SPOILERS AHEAD!I'm going to go through the most common criticisms for this film:1) They killed off the main cast.This is more something that angered 80's fans. Most people today would call it bold. There's a gravity to it... that later seasons of the cartoon decided to contradict that by bringing them back to like. However, they still managed to respect Optimus' death. Sort of life Gandalf the Grey coming back as Gandalf the White, his death in this movie was a setup for a victorious return.2) The animation is cheap.Computer-animating those shots to such detail would have already been a nightmare, so imagine how much manpower was put to bringing them to life by hand?3) There is no plot.The purpose of this film isn't to confuse little children with complex twists. The purpose was to expand The Transformers universe with an intergalactic adventure, depicting the fictional societies, politics, and technologies of several alien races, obviously including the titular Transformers.4) There is no character growth.Hot Rod was a young, innocent, but impulsive soldier who got Optimus killed. Optimus left the Matrix with Ultra Magnus, whose tactical leadership style is invaluable to the Autobot cause, but he would later find that the Matrix was never his to use. Meanwhile, Starscream usurps the Decepticon leadership from his injured commander, but Megatron is reborn as Galvatron, an almighty warrior who gradually admits to himself that he is only a pathetic slave to Unicron. The prodigy Hot Rod returns as Rodimus Prime and redeems himself by unleashing the light of the Matrix and destroying Unicron. That growth is pretty philosophical.5) There is no dramatic tone.If you didn't react when the movie opened with Unicron devouring a planet, when Optimus died, when Galvatron finally executed Starscream, when Daniel thought his father died, when Unicron transformed into a giant robot, when Galvatron failed to use the Matrix to escape Unicron's control, or when Hot Rod became Rodimus Prime and blew up Unicron, you must be no fun to talk to.Obviously, I'm also going to praise the excellent voice cast, the spunky rock soundtrack, some of the best one-liners I've ever heard, and the overall fun of the movie.

If the argument can be made that the original "Transformers" cartoon is about as commercialistic as they come (it surely can), then TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE is that notion taken to an extreme. To remedy the drop in sales of some of the action figures, Hasbro decided to just kill off those characters on the big screen and make room for new ones. That is some cutthroat boardroom strategy, right there. In any event, we got a decent movie out of it. Or at least a peculiar one. The voice cast is an eyebrow-raiser (Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Orson Welles, the Micro Machines guy), but there's at least the heightened production values that are an improvement over the quality of the TV show. And I've grown oddly fond of the movie's soundtrack - awful metal and all – but it's also got one of my favorite Weird Al songs on it . . . seemingly at random! That tickles me. It's pretty cool, taps into the whole childhood thing pretty well (even with the slaughter of all those non-selling characters) and it doesn't induce nausea like the Bay movies do.7/10