My introduction to the Transformers was through my cousins whose mother was born and raised in Japan and whose father had returned there after his parents had died in the US. Yet the science fiction action animation film “Transformers One” continues on a trajectory that ignores Japanese contributions to the creation and popularity of Habro’s Transformers toy line, despite attempts to bring diversity to the voice casting.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Transformers, these stories are about sentient alien robots who are divided into the good Autobots and the bad Decepticons. In Japan, they are known as Cybertrons (good) and Destrons (bad). Their home planet is Cybertron. 

For the Autobots, at the dawn of time, were the Primes. 

The film begins not unlike “Aliens: Romulus,” with miners. Two besties, Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) are underlings. They have no power to transform. They are mining for Energon, the power source or fuel that all Transformers need. While true energy emanates from the creator-god of the Transformers, Primus, something in the past happened that made this substance rare. The Autobots believe it is connected to the loss of the Autobot Matrix of Leadership (Creation Matrix). When the Matrix of Leadership was lost during a war with the Quintessons, so were the Primes, except for  Sentinel Prime (voiced by Jon Hamm) are gone. Orion Pax idolizes Sentinel Prime. 

Now Autobots without cogs must mine so that the rest of the Autobots can function. 

Orion wants something more and he’s always dragging his bestie D-16 into shenanigans. Orion wants to search the archives for clues to the location of the Matrix of Leadership. That doesn’t mean others aren’t searching for the Matrix. Orion’s hero Sentinel Prime goes to the hostile and forbidden above ground world, supposedly searching for the Matrix.  The archives are well-guarded and off-limits. That should hint at something nefarious. 

Soon after,  Orion and D-16 are in a mining accident and when they disobey orders, this causes their supervisor Elita-1 (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) to be demoted. This could mean bad things for the besties, but Orion and D-16 are also last-minute and unintentional competitors in an annual moral building rac, the Iacon 5000, between the Autobots with cogs who can transform. The underdog duo’s gutsy performance brings them to the attention of Sentinel Prime and  Sentinel Prime gives them a new assignment where they meet B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key). Together, Orion, D-16, B-127 and Elita-1 will go on a physical and emotional journey that explains how the  Optimus Prime and Megatron became enemies and how the Matrix of Leadership was lost. 

My husband, a fan of the Transformers as a franchise gave this film, directed by Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4,” 2019) and written by Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (based on a story by Barrer and Ferrari),  a solid three stars, but I had problems with diversity. 

Diversity

While “Transformers One” is part of the Hasbro Transformer franchise, there hasn’t been an animated feature film since the 1980s. The 1986 film, “The Transformers: The Movie,” was directed (and co-produced) by South Korean Nelson Shin who had also produced the television series. 

There was diversity in the voice actors then, including Jewish Americans. Judd Nelson voiced  the lead character Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime and Lionel Stander voiced Kup. Leonard Nimoy voiced Galvatron. African Americans were represented by voice actors Buster L. Jones (Blaster), Arthur Burghardt (Devastator) and Scatman Crothers (Jazz).  Arab Americans got representation via Casey Kasem (Cliffjumper). 

Looking through the Michael Bay directed live-action Transformers film series–beginning with the 2007 “Transformers” and Ending with the 2017 “Transformers: The Last Knight,” the main characters are mostly White with African American or Black characters of authority (e.g. Tyrese Gibson as Robert Epps) or comic relief (Reno Wilson).

Asian Americans don’t come into play until the 2011 “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” with Keiko Agena as the aid and assistant of the Director of National Intelligence Charlotte Mearing and Ken Jeong as Jerry “Deep” Wang, a paranoid software programmer. Iqbal Theba plays a UN Secretary General.

In the 2014 “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” Li Bingbing portrays Su Yueming, the owner of a Chinese factory used by KSI to build artificial Transformers. Mandopop singer Han Geng portrays himself. Ken Watanabe portrays an Autobot and former Deception assassin with a samurai-motif called Drift. 

In the 2017 “Transformers: The Last Knight,” Ken Watanabe returned as Drift and Gemma Chan voiced a Cybertronian sorceress, Quintessa. 

The 2018 “Bumblebee” which was directed by Travis Knight (written by Christina Hodson), starred part Filipina Hailee Steinfeld. But if you crash-land in California, especially if you film in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Vallejo and Mare Island, you might expect more representation by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who in 2022 were 15 percent of the population (with Black/African American at 5 percent and Latino/Hispanic at 40 percent). 

The 2007 film, “Transformers” reportedly reused footage from Bay’s 2001 “Pearl Harbor” (ships at sea), but was also based at Hughes Aircraft in Playa Vista. Playa Vista is 26.8 % Asian American (11.8% Black/African American and 12.5% Hispanic/Latino). 

The second Bay film (2009), “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” was shot in Playa Vista, Long Beach, Imperial Beach, Coronado, Point Loma and San Diego Bay in California as well as New Mexico, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Qatar, Jordan, France and Egypt. Long Beach is 44% Latino and 12% Asian (27% White). Imperial Beach is 4% Black/African American, but 6% Asian American and 53% Latino/Hispanic. San Diego County is 35% Latino/Hispanic, 12% Asian and 4% Black/African American. 

For the 2023 “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” Michelle Yeoh voices Aerator, a Maximal warrior who can transform into a Peregrine falcon. 

For diversity in this animated feature “Transformers One,” we have African American voice actors Brian Tyree Henry (“Atlanta”), Keegan-Michael Key (“Key & Peele”) and Lawrence Fishburne. That’s to be expected.  In addition, Michael Lee voices Jazz and Isaac C. Singleton Jr. is Darkwing. 

If one can argue that the voice acting leads of a film set in Africa, such as the 2019 “The Lion King,” should be predominately African American or Black, even if the story doesn’t originate from Africa, then why doesn’t some of this logic about ethnicity apply to the Transformers? In 2019, “The Lion King” had Donald Glover (Simba), James Earl Jones (reprising his role as Mufasa from the 1994 animated film), Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (Nana), Chiwetel Ejijofor (Scar), Eric Andrē (Azizi)  Florence Kasumba (Shenzi) and Keegan-Michael Key (Kamari). 

While Tezuka Productions didn’t want to litigate in 1994, a group of 488 Japanese cartoonists and animators protested “The Lion King,” claiming that it was based on Osamu Tezuka’s “Kimba, the White Lion” or, in Japanese, “Jungle Emperor” (ジャングル大帝,).  

• Japanese Animator Protests ‘Lion King’ (18 August 1994)
• Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland (p. 164)

While one might quibble about just where the idea of “The Lion King” came from, there is no arguing that the concept of the Transformers came from Japan. Shouldn’t more roles in the Transformers be given to Japanese or Japanese Americans or even other East Asian actors to acknowledge that the Transformers is an idea that came from Japan? As I noted above, sometimes the demographics of the locations should argue for better representation of Asian Americans and Latinos. 

In 1983, Hasbro representatives sent to a Tokyo Toy Show noticed the Transformer toy line of Japanese toy manufacturer Takara. Takara was founded in 1955 but merged in 2006 with Tomy Company (founded in 1924) to become Takara Tomy.

The original 28 figures were designed byJapanese anime designers Shōji Kawamori (河森 正治) and Kazutaka Miyatake (宮武 一貴), both of who are still living.  Yet in 2024, diversity for the Transformers continues to function on a binary of Black and White. Both Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry have been promoting this film, but there are no Japanese or Japanese Americans as primary characters. The cast list does include Jinny Chung voicing Chromia, but Chromia is not one of the main characters.  

Despite the franchise having originated from a Japanese idea with Japanese designers for the original characters, the franchise apparently doesn’t feel that in 2024, a Japanese or Japanese American could possibly be the face of the voice behind the main characters, even though this month saw the TV series “Shōgun” victorious at the Emmy Awards. 

• Shoji Kawamori, the Creator Hollywood Copies But Never Credits (10 December 2015)
• He Created Macross and Designed Transformers Toys: Japanese Anime Legend Shoji Kawamori (27 February 2019)
• Shoji Kawamori (Official Website)

“Shōgun” which is a historical drama set in Japan was adapted from Australian-born British-raised James Clavell’s 1975 novel. This month, it became the first Japanese-language series to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series (the second non-English language series to be nominated after the Korean-language “Squid Games”).  The series won 18 out of 25 nominations, setting a record as the most awarded single season of television in Emmy history as well as making lead actor Hiroyuki Sanada the first Japanese actor to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and the second East Asian actor to win (after Lee Jung-jae for Netflix’s “Squid Game”). He also received a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series for his role as a producer. Anna Sawai also became the first Japanese actress and the first actress of East Asian descent to win a Primetime Emmy.

Yet “Shōgun” isn’t a singular phenomena. There were other successes that should have paved the way for more East Asian representation such as the success of “Squid Games” on TV in 2021 and the 2022 Oscar win for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and the 2019 Oscar for Kwok Sin-ae and Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite.”

If it’s time to show “we’re more than meets the eye,” then isn’t it time to show that people of East Asian descent can be so much more and acknowledge their contributions to the entertainment world? Wouldn’t that help make a better world? Otherwise, how can we, people of all races and ethnicities, build a future together? I like Chris Hemsworth in the later Thor films but I’m slightly irked with Brian Tyree Henry’s character in “Bullet Train” and I wasn’t a fan of “Eternals.”  

• ‘Eternals’: Ensemble Diversity Casting High But Entertainment Value Low ⭐️⭐️
• ‘Bullet Train’: Whitewash and Blackout of Japanese Characters ⭐️⭐️

Diversity in “Transformers One” could and should pay tribute to the country from which the idea came from, but in 2024, it doesn’t. The kind of diversity represented by this film, brings it down a star for me. 

“Transformers One” premiered in Sydney, Australia on 11 September 2024 and was released by Paramount Pictures on 20 September 2024 in the US.