Over the Christmas / New Year holiday time the New Zealand Herald
newspaper ran this series of articles with journalists giving their
suggestions for New Zealand's favourite family film for The Great
Family Film Poll ...


*Transformers:* *The* *Movie*
Transformers: The Movie is my favourite family film,
but I can't imagine gathering the family around to watch
it. Sure, it offers useful lessons in loyalty and
inspires self-belief, but this is one dark,
far-from-cuddly movie.

The action is bludgeoning, relentless, violent -
mostly feuding robots tearing each other to shreds.

As a 7 to 8-year-old, Transformers was probably the
closest thing to an obsession I had. I watched the TV
series religiously, bugged my folks to get me the toys
and when the movie came out on VHS, watched it more
times than I can remember.

Everything seemed magnified in the movie. The scale
was huge. Its Big Bad was Unicron, an immensely
terrifying robot planet with an appetite for devouring
other planets.

Along with the expanded scope, the movie raised the
emotional stakes, providing the most traumatic twist
any young Transformers fan can think of: the death of
Optimus Prime.

As the noble , valiant leader of the Autobot clan,
Optimus stood for all those heroic, invincible
qualities you'd want from a male role model at that
age. His defeat at the hands of Megatron dealt a
crushing blow to this notion.

It's one of the most mind-blowing animated deaths ever,
matching the loss of Bambi's mother for sheer
devastation. When the lights went out in Optimus' eyes,
you felt like you had just lost your father.

Revisiting the movie now is a bizarre, but no less
interesting experience.

Certain things boggle the mind as an adult, like the
cosmically surreal voice talent (Orson Welles, Scatman
Crothers, Robert Stack) and the perverse, psychedelic
intensity of the imagery.

Others don't change: Stan Bush's The Touch remains a
perfectly triumphant climatic theme song.

My hair stands on end every time it kicks in from the
giddy sense of nostalgia that overwhelms you when you
watch a favourite family film.

- Aaron Yap, Flicks.co.nz Contributing Writer
8 January, 2016

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