For almost 40 years, Transformers is one of the most iconic entertainment franchises in the world. Entertaining generations of fans with its own different generations of content, the iconic toy series is also an incredible success story between both its Japanese and American incarnations.
With the recent War for Cybertron anime trilogy on Netflix, the synergy between the series’ international roots and its various incarnations became more apparent than ever. With the upcoming art book dedicated to the War for Cybertron coming out this fall Viz Media, GameRant spoke with series showrunner FJ DeSanto and producer Mike Avila about the inspiration and creation behind the show.
GameRant: Looking at some material for the upcoming art book, you can definitely feel the passion that the War for Cybertron anime had for Transformers, the different eras of the property and the way these different phases and characters could be brought together. When you were adapting a property with so many different phases and eras to draw from, what were some of the biggest influences over the years and how did you hope to add to that tradition?
War for Cybertron showrunner FJ DeSanto: It’s very simple, in the sense that the freedom we got with the project was based on what Hasbro did with the toys. We knew the framework of where they wanted to take it in terms of tone and direction, and then the big thump was to finally get the Beast Wars era characters in. We knew it would be a prequel to G1 Transformers, so we carefully studied the original Transformers, the anime that came at the end of the original series, the older Marvel comics, and then the shows from the Beast Wars era. All of our writers were chosen because they had a fondness for those particular eras of the IP. When you go into all the other series and everything with something as long and legendary as Transformers, you plunge into a black hole that you will never get out of.
GameRant: Interesting! Being on a gaming website, one of the big things that come to mind for some of our readers would be the eponymous title War for Cybertron video games that were on many of the larger game consoles from the early 2010s. Were this an inspiration, or did you kind of do your own thing?
deSanto: Not very direct, no, actually. I think there are some tonal similarities, but that’s all from Hasbro and we tried to adapt it for a narrative show. Making a show is definitely very different from developing a game, and I think from a tonal and visual standpoint these games are definitely spiritual cousins, if that makes sense. We’d played those games and were all pretty familiar with them, but honestly, it wasn’t something we were actively digging into as part of the creative process for the anime.
GameRant: And as you quoted, in many previous Transformers animated series, many of them have always had a strong tone focus as an American animated series or a Japanese anime series. But with this new project, it’s a really strong synergy between its status as an anime in production and its American influence on the development end. That must have been a very interesting production flow.
deSanto: We were really helped by the fact that the studio, Polygon Pictures, had a lot of previous experience with others Transformers projects and on many international animation co-productions in general. The creative development and writing was all done in Burbank, and we worked with a very close-knit team on that front. With that, we got some resource and business help from Rooster Teeth, and we were able to send stuff to Japan to work on the visualization and storyboards prior to the actual full-length creation of the anime. After the animation, a lot of the sound design was done in America, and then we finally sent it back to Netflix in Japan. It was Netflix’s anime division in Japan that we worked with to wrap everything up before it finally came out. The collaborative element was definitely kind of a unique process, but it gave a lot of power that really made the show what it was.
War for Cybertron producer Mike Avila: And that goes back to one of the most interesting things I realized when we were collecting a lot of this material for the upcoming book, which is how much they enjoyed this way of working together. Polygon’s team in Japan, in particular, enjoyed the freedom of both Hasbro and the writing team on how to get the images out. Without that trust given to them, the show wouldn’t have turned out the way it was.
deSanto: The book illustrated really excellently how the show was made, and the show was happily made thanks to the collaboration, with very few speed bumps.
GameRant: One of the things that stood out about the processes that emerge in the book was the way the voice lines were initially recorded and transmitted. Would you like to share more about that?
deSanto: The one thing we did that made that role so strong, and this was actually the idea of our co-producer Matt Murray who was responsible for this, was we filmed all the voice actors doing their lines. We got the way their faces moved with the lines so the animators in Japan could use all that visual information to bring it out. Sure, with some Transformers – you don’t see Optimus’s mouth anyway – but it’s a huge help to get a lot of the visual information about that language barrier between Japanese and English.
GameRant: It seems that the different studios were really suited to a project like this. You have Polygon, who has experience working with Hasbro and Transformers that they could bring; but you also had RoosterTeeth. Many readers on a site like ours have memories of RoosterTeeth from back in the day where they animate video game clips of Halo and really get the vibe of this CGI character acting. What was it like working with them for something as big as Transformers?
deSanto: The collaboration with RoosterTeeth had its strength more on the business side. We got to use their business infrastructure for many of them, and our involvement with them was actually something that came as a result of many of the Warner Bros. mergers that were happening at the time. They were an animation company come in, internal to WB, and they were able to bring in a lot of their experience in animation to really get a lot out of it in logistics. Their strength has been to make things smoother on the business front and work with Netflix for much of the logistics of really getting things out during both the business stuff going on at WB and, later, during covid. We had already delivered, I think the entire first season when the pandemic hit? Rooster Teeth had certainly helped streamline logistics, which we certainly needed at the time.
GameRant: And this definitely sounds like Hasbro was big on synergizing the anime with the collectibles. What did that process look like?
deSanto: That is a good question. I was involved in a smaller scale Transformers show, First World Warswho really started that relationship and set the stage for a lot of what we could do in War for Cybertron. Because of that trust and our desire to keep the anime as authentic as possible for the toys for Cybertron, Hasbro had sent us the CAD data and the model sheets for the toy itself. You’ll see a lot of it in the book, actually. For some of the more niche characters not yet in production in the toylines, they had given us some files going all the way back to the ’80s.
GameRant: And with that feeling that this series, that it went both to the roots of the franchise and kind of an update with the G1/Beast Wars collaboration, what kind of reactions did you get from the fans, or some surprises from the analytics data at Netflix?
deSanto: When you play with two different eras like this, I still get hate messages from some of the more purist fans on social media *laughs* No, but one big thing we learned as a surprise was that we were developing this show for an older audience who were more familiar with the inspirations. After the first season started, we found out that a lot of the younger audience that watched it got to know it, was introduced to that older style when they watched it with their parents. They had their nostalgia, but they were able to introduce it to their children. I hope in the future this might be something kids of today can point to as their gateway to Transformers.
Avila: I think one of the things that will age really well with this show is the meeting between the G1 Transformers and the Beast Wars era. I know there was a bit of fanboy hesitation, or maybe even outrage at the whole multiverse aspect we were going for. But I hope the more you look at it, you can see how we tried to make something that would be so cool as a concept and with so much potential that I think it turned out really well. This was something Transformers fans had on their minds for years, and I really hope we can point to the reveal as a great reward for it. That was the big hook for the end of the trilogy, and that’s what you get to see in the art book.
The Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy Art Book will be available in October, published by Viz Media. The War for Cybertron Trilogy streaming on Netflix now.
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