The Wild Robot Beats Transformers One both Critically and Commercially

-Kanrabat- wrote:Mistake #1 was to not make the movie in the same style as the intro of the Bee Movie.

No. That was no mistake because this movie is gorgeous. There is no reason to make a fully animated film look photorealistic if there is nothing actually realistic in the movie to juxtapose it with (hello Disney's Lion King remake).

Sabrblade wrote:

-Kanrabat- wrote:Mistake #1 was to not make the movie in the same style as the intro of the Bee Movie.

No. That was no mistake because this movie is gorgeous. There is no reason to make a fully animated film look photorealistic if there is nothing actually realistic in the movie to juxtapose it with (hello Disney's Lion King remake).

Personally, I too, find the style of the movie to be perfect.
But marketability dictate that it would have fared way better in the hyper realistic style.

The Lion King remake was totally unnecessary and was quite uncanny with their hyper realistic cartoon style. But it made enough money to warrant a sequel. A sequel that is panned by the hardcore, but the casual are exited to see. Comparing to what my family say VS what the comments/forums/content creators says.

So, it is sad to say, buy TF1 in super realistic Bee Movie intro style would have sold more tickets. Way more.

Well, we never know "what would have happened if X" or that there will be no good TF movies in the future, ever, so... By all indications, this movie should return a modest profit in the end and hopefully at least one sequel. But it's certainly not performed as well as we / Hasbro / Paramount were hoping, and there's little point pretending that isn't the case.

Where it's succeeded is in being well-reviewed and well-received by its (modest) audiences, and we can expect that more people will eventually watch it on streaming / disc than saw it in the cinema. So one big thing it can do is help rehabilitate the brand, which doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation at the movies right now, and maybe get more people interested in seeing the next one.

Yeeesh, will's description's making me picture a future Robot Chicken sketch where The Wild Robot literally lands on Cybertron beats up the entire population.

The video mentioned that TF ONE still did better than TWR outside the U.S. this weekend, and that's making me wonder what countries each film was released in. But no amount of data mining can change the totals.

Rodimus Prime wrote:For all of Bayverse's faults, when I was looking at the screen I was convinced (or at least could easily pretend) that I was looking at metallic living beings.

Really? Because one of the big issues I had with the Bayverse films was that the robots never felt right in the scene to me - they always seemed floaty, or the physics didn't sell, or some other thing. They always just looked like special effects IMO, and not at a level I expected from ILM. #shrug#

Rodimus Prime wrote:If we had gotten the style of the opening scene of Bumblebee, which was the best part of the movie aside from perhaps the fight scene with Bee and the triplechangers, it would have gone a long way in helping the general audience decide to see it. The way TFOne looks, we all knew it was gonna be an animated movie, and not a movie with CGI in it.

Matter of taste I suppose - for me, the Cybertron section was one of the less interesting bits of the film, and the most jammed-in-for-fan-service. (Not the bits I most disliked - that would probably be the very Bay-esque little brother / cringe stepdad.) The designs were vastly improved from the previous films though, in that they actually looked like Transformers ( ), but a whole movie that looked like that would have been (a) incredibly expensive and (b) targeted very much at older fans, not new kids and casuals. I thought the animation in the rest of the film, particularly between Charlie and Bee, did way better both at actual character acting and in feeling realistically grounded in the scene, over the same 'robot PAWNCH!' bouncy action we'd seen before. IMO, YMMV, etc.

I maintain that the timing of release - back to school, sandwiched between Beetlejuice and TWR, staggered by almost a month overseas - did far more to hurt its chances than the style. But who knows, in the end - there's a lot of variables in play.

Amen to that, in the general!

In the specific, as an animation junkie and proponent of "it's a medium, not a genre"... that bias that sees non-hyperreal animated movies as "kids' stuff" and turns adults away is unfortunately a big factor. Unless you're a proven big name like Pixar or Dreamworks - and often even then! - you've got an uphill struggle if you're putting out an all-ages animated feature. There are always some standouts - Spider-Verse, Arcane etc - but the bias is sadly pretty pervasive.

But we also can't attribute everything to that - after all, the film currently kicking TF1's ass is another, much more polished-looking all-ages animated feature from Dreamworks. When I said a whole movie that looked like the BB movie's Cybertron scene would be targeted at older fans, I wasn't (only) talking about the "realistic" rendering but about the whole aesthetic: heroic-proportioned bots leaping around the place, blasting and punching each other to shreds over a constant backdrop of explosions. Though I haven't seen it yet, my understanding from the discussions is that that aesthetic would have been badly mismatched with TF1's overall tone and story style. (The other thing to note is that it would have been much more expensive, and on current performance would likely have turned TF1 from modestly profitable to a financial flop.)

I hear that the full movie has some gorgeous visuals, particularly vistas and individual scenes, but that initial trailer (the only thing I've really seen besides the Kayou cards, by intent, which puts me in a similar position to much of the prospective audience) looked fairly mid-tier on the level of both character design and animation - more like a game cutscene than a full movie in places. The character designs are serviceable but not really much more than that, pretty generic and interchangeable, and the animation was weirdly stiff at times (B-127 turning and running was a standout in my memory, along with that shot of Dread/Darkwing looking like a cheap, cobbled-together game extra). For contrast, TF Prime, while much less advanced in the rendering and 14 years older, managed some excellent character animation on a much lower budget!

If there's one thing I can assume for The Wild Robot, based on Dreamworks' past record, it's that it will be polished to a high sheen, with characters carefully tuned for audience appeal. That polish & appeal in the design is what I felt was lacking in TF1's marketing presentation, and the cut of the initial trailer ("Badassitron" ) really wouldn't help raise it to must-see rather than meh if I wasn't already invested as a TF and animation fan. Which is a crying shame, because from everything I've heard the rest of the movie is excellent.


--EDIT--
I'm probably coming off as more negative than I mean to. I'm tired. Really just rambling on designing for appeal and the need to make the story, presentation and marketing all line up the same direction for the target demo.

Glyph wrote:

Rodimus Prime wrote:For all of Bayverse's faults, when I was looking at the screen I was convinced (or at least could easily pretend) that I was looking at metallic living beings.

Really? Because one of the big issues I had with the Bayverse films was that the robots never felt right in the scene to me - they always seemed floaty, or the physics didn't sell, or some other thing. They always just looked like special effects IMO, and not at a level I expected from ILM. #shrug#

To each her/his own. Bayverse wasn't perfect visually by any means. But as I explained in my response to Sabrblade, I still had easier time believing I was looking at a real living being in the live action films. Perhaps because real humans were also included in the scene?

Matter of taste I suppose

Full stop. You suppose correctly.

I maintain that the timing of release - back to school, sandwiched between Beetlejuice and TWR, staggered by almost a month overseas - did far more to hurt its chances than the style. But who knows, in the end - there's a lot of variables in play.

Agreed on the timing. This should have been either a June release or even a March or April release. Just seems that the producers already knew this would mainly appeal to TF fans so they just put it out there and didn't bother serious marketing to children. Which should anger Hasbro because that damaged their promotion of the toyline.

Sabrblade wrote:

Rodimus Prime wrote:Agreed on the timing. This should have been either a June release or even a March or April release. Just seems that the producers already knew this would mainly appeal to TF fans so they just put it out there and didn't bother serious marketing to children. Which should anger Hasbro because that damaged their promotion of the toyline.

It seems they went with September to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the G1 cartoon. But a May release would have better coincided with the actual 40th anniversary of the whole brand.

Absolutely Agreed. May 8th to be exact. It was a Wednesday, would've given the movie a nice 5-day opening.

it lays the smackdown on Transformers One’s candy ass

I cringed.

Glyph wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

Rodimus Prime wrote:Agreed on the timing. This should have been either a June release or even a March or April release.

It seems they went with September to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the G1 cartoon. But a May release would have better coincided with the actual 40th anniversary of the whole brand.

As I understand it, it was supposed to be July 19 for the summer crowd, but pushed back to September 13 (presumably for final crunch because it wasn't ready) then again to September 25 to avoid the Beetlejuice premiere. Which then, ironically, only gave it one week before TWR.

September 20.