I didn't really post my thoughts on Bumblebee to this site as far as I know, so short version - easily the best Transformers film, period. Makes the '86 film look like the okay film we all secretly know it is but will never admit because nostalgia (it's okay I do the same). It had heart, it had emotion, it had CHARACTER, but more than anything, it had a vision that was executed masterfully. A vision belonging to Travis Knight, who, as it turns out, is perfect for the franchise because of his skill set.

And no, I'm not talking about his skills as a rapper, although...

(Yep, that's actually Travis Knight. His dad is also the founder of Nike but this is WAY funnier.)

No, it's not his ability to make Vanilla Ice look like Suge Knight that made his perfect for Bumblebee. It was his skills as an animator.

With animation, you have several challenges ahead of you. One of them is to visually convey emotion on the face of a character that doesn't exist. So with Bumblebee, a character who LITERALLY CAN'T SPEAK, you REALLY have to find a way to make him emote. I don't know how they did it, but they took Movie Bee's weird skeleton bug face and made it... cute? Also emotive. VERY emotive. I remember seeing featurettes where they talked about how in all the characters designs they cleared up the area around their eyes to let them emote with them more. This is crucial - eyes are the "Gateway to the soul" for a reason, so allowing them more room to move and emote is paramount to getting the audience to feel for them. That's why Bee feels so scared in the garage - his body language as well as facial expressions let us know that. It's also more convenient to have skilled animators led by a skilled director who knows how animation works help give the robots emotion, rather than expensive mocap hardware.

As well with animation, you have to have almost an even clearer sense of cinematography than live action filmmakers. Not to knock live action cinematographers AT ALL, but with animation you have to create EVERYTHING from scratch, so it's important to know the angle of the environment, how you want light to move through it, etc. Travis took this knowledge and translated it very well to live action - not only is the cinematography in general better in Bumblebee, but the mostly animated fight scenes are great and thrilling, from high speed pulls as Blitzwing flies through the air to extreme zooms as Bee charges at Dropkick, the fight scenes are shot so much more competently and artistically in Bee.

And then there's the fully animated Cybertron scenes. Do you want me to go into any more detail?

There's plenty of other reasons I can mention (the storyboarding process, for example, was probably way easier on Bumblebee), but the point remains - animators know how to work within Transformers. No, every director in the future should necessarily be required to be an animator, but they should know how to work like an animator or have one present. After all, the Transformers are gonna have to be CGI anyway, right?

And all this talk about animation makes me sad that we never got a Don Bluth Transformers film.