Paramount Pictures has rolled out four new character posters for Transformers One (via Toonado.com), putting the spotlight on the movie’s leads: Orion Pax/Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth), D-16/Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry), Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), and B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key). 

Despite praise coming out of CinemaCon, the trailer hasn’t received glowing reviews from Transformers fans. Comparisons are being made to a Nick Jr. animated series, and while this is a little (well, a lot) higher budget than that, it’s easy to see where they’re coming from. 

In a recent interview with IGN, director Josh Cooley addressed the decision to go with a CG-driven look for a franchise which has typically been presented in classic 2D animation.

“Because of where it exists in the timeline, there was no reason to have humans. So the live-action aspect of it was off the table,” he explains. “This whole thing being on their planet and Cybertron, which is completely made of living metal, which means that it can transform itself and move around, and that our characters are robots, it just felt natural to tell this movie in CG.”

“Even though it is animated, my whole goal was to make it feel believable. You don’t look at it and go, ‘This is real,’ but you look at it and you almost forget that you’re watching an animated film and you’re just enjoying this characters,” the filmmaker continued. “So my goal is always to have a level of believability to it.”

As for why the movie’s robots have expressive faces now, Cooley added, “Absolutely. Yeah. Everything in CG is a choice, because nothing’s real and nothing is for free. So first of all, they have to earn their faceplates. They don’t just get them right away. They have to earn the rights for them, basically. Yeah, in order to have these characters be able to emote clearly, I wanted be able to see their eyes, see their faces.”

“That’s why we went back to kind of the G1 style of design for these characters, the original cartoon, that had very expressive faces and wanted to do an updated version of that.”

Transformers One is the untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, better known as sworn enemies, but once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever.

The first-ever fully CG-animated Transformers movie features a star-studded voice cast, including Chris Hemsworth (Orion Pax), Brian Tyree Henry (D-16), Scarlett Johansson (Elita-1) and Keegan-Michael Key (B-127), Steve Buscemi, with Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Hamm.

Transformers One is directed by Josh Cooley and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto & Don Murphy, Michael Bay, Mark Vahradian, Aaron Dem and executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Zev Foreman, Olivier Dumont, Brian Oliver, B.J. Farmer, Matt Quig.

The movie is set to be released in theaters on September 20.