.jeri.

A couple of weeks ago we had a movie night and it was Ric's pick. He says he's starting to run out of ideas, but really, I wasn't disappointed by the fact that he chose a childhood favorite of his, which is the animated Transformers movie from the 1980s. After all, it actually has a surprising vocal cast for its time, including the likes of Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Casy Kasem, Eric Idle, and Orson Welles. You read that correctly. It was actually the one of the last projects for the late Orson Welles, who apparently wasn't quite in great shape for work according to Ric, who found out that Welles turned in such bad material that they had to enhance his vocals to cover up his slurred speech and heavy breathing.

Anyway, I'm all for checking out animated feature-length movies, especially when they are serious for the most part, and, of course, full of action. When I wrote about the most recent Transformers movie, I talked about how unrelenting it was with the action at the beginning of the movie, but realized that the amount of action was proportionate to what I saw the boys doing when they played with their action figures when I was a kid. Apparently, their play was proportionate to the amount of action in the animated Transformers movie. This thing is nonstop action for a really, really long time. One is able to gather a sense of who's good and who's bad, and that's all that's needed to process the first half or so of the movie.

A plot actually does emerge, in which the Autobots first fight the Decepticons, and ultimately Unicron, a planet-like evil entity that destroys all other planets. Unicron wants possession of the one thing that makes the Autobots powerful, the Matrix of Leadership, which is kept inside of Megatron.

For its time, I think this movie was not at all average. Usually kids go to the movies because they want to see their heroes glorified on the big screen. But in this case, so many of the heroes are injured or killed, Ric has memories of being completely crushed as he watched this movie. So I can see why it wasn't exactly popular when it was first released, although I'm pretty sure many kids still found it cool because it was such a spectacle in action and animation.

I actually really enjoyed the animation style of the movie, along with the rock music that accompanies many scenes. It looks rather rich compared to some of the episodes of the tv show I have seen, and so I was surprised by how detailed it got, especially with the action sequences. It's got some great use of color and angles. All of that combined with the vocal talent made for a satisfying movie. Wow.