The best animated movie of 2024 not called ‘The Wild Robot’ rescues franchises from themselves on streaming

Ever since the turn of the decade, animated films have been having quite the moment. Guillermo del Toro — off the back of his Best Animated Feature Oscar win for his stop-motion Pinocchio film — has emerged as a leading proponent of giving animation the respect it deserves as a medium, while Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Boy and the Heron, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and Pixar’s mortal essence have continued to smash boundaries and redefine them.

The year of 2024 has had its fair share of boundary-smashers as well, most notably DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot, but it’s Transformers One that, despite its discouraging box office performance, just may have pulled off the most remarkable animated feat in recent memory. Topping the streaming charts is kind of impressive too, I guess.

Per FlixPatrol, Transformers One is currently bossing the Paramount Plus charts in first place in the United States at the time of writing. Under its boot is its disgustingly inferior IP cousin Transformers in eighth place, while Gladiator — likely owing its success to the imminent theatrical release of Gladiator II — trails behind in second place.

Transformers One — an animated reimagining of the Transformers cinematic canon — stars Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry as Orion Pax and D-16, two miner robots and best friends living in the city of Iacon who spend their days getting by on hard labor and waning enthusiasm. But they soon get wrapped up in a conspiracy that sends them throttling towards their destinies, fracturing their relationship as Orion Pax becomes Optimus Prime and D-16 becomes Megatron.

The genius of Transformers One lies not in its brilliant storytelling fundamentals, but in how it transforms the challenges of IP filmmaking into strengths (especially with an IP as vast and storied as Transformers). As a compartmentalized story that’s adhering to the history of Transformers rather than any sort of canon, Transformers One was tasked with building out a new world for its proceedings to take place in, and a lesser film would have dumped all of this info on us, and subsequently expect us to invest in a world that hasn’t earned our attention with a good story.

But Transformers One, being anything but lesser, doesn’t fall for that trap. Every single worldbuilding detail is rooted directly in the emotions of the characters and the specific journey that they’re on. In this way, the world, scope, and spectacle of Transformers One gets to breathe in a way that it should in any Transformers film, but it’s never at the expense of the story that viewers actually care about, and in fact enhances that story. The film’s opening scene is the greatest example of this.

So while a film like The Wild Robot will likely steal the animated crown on the back of its robustly elite emotional storytelling, Transformers One represents a way forward for IP storytelling that’s desperately needed right now. Why not explore more standalone canons that are inspired by source material rather than directly adapted from it (and therefore create more room for original story beats and arcs with characters and worlds that so many people love)? Why not take more advantage of flexible animated frames that allow action and emotion to unfold more honestly than their live-action counterparts, which seem increasingly addicted to spectacle for the sake of spectacle?

Indeed, can you imagine how refreshing it would be if Marvel Studios released an animated trilogy of Avengers films that weren’t beholden to the MCU’s collapsing canon and branding ethos?