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Screened alongside the 40th anniversary re-release of The Transformers: The Movie, with this short playing directly after the main feature, director Joshua Wassung and The Third Floor's Optimus Prime: Awakening plays with metatextual concepts that would seem to go hand-in-hand with a toy franchise that is constantly reinventing itself. Disappointingly though, this funereal self-reflection is undermined somewhat by gauche pleas for further adventure. It's difficult though not to commiserate with Awakening's filmmakers. The short now carries the final performance of the late Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and is therefore expected, quite unreasonably, to function as something of an epitaph for the actor as well as the role he became synonymous with. Beginning with Prime's death, as seen in The Movie, Awakening follows the flicker of the Autobot Commander's life force as it journeys into a machine afterlife to commune with a swirling intelligence that describes itself as a repository of all Cybertronian consciousness.
Instead of Primus, the creator of The Transformers in the Marvel comics continuity, this is, seemingly, a God that they themselves have created, through millennia of warfare and struggle. While it does feel appropriate that a race of robots who are locked into a never-ending civil war - that has raged for millions of years and completely drained the resources of their home planet - would be ruled, from a remove, by an entity reminiscent of The Idea of Evil from Kentaro Miura's Berserk, but it's outright weird to see the rhetoric of cosmic indifference being wielded as the precise summation of a character famously described by his voice actor as strong enough to be gentle. Really, the tension in the modern Transformers property is that adults (myself included) cannot disengage from a Saturday morning sales pitch that is nearly half a century old. Elements of Awakening speak to this fact directly, literally demanding that Optimus Prime lay down his vestments of office and stride, confidently into oblivion, but this effect is dulled by comparison to the work that precedes Wassung's film.
Rather than cling weakly to life, like his tyrannical rival Megatron, the Prime of The Movie is almost ecstatic in his passing; commanding his subordinates not to grieve and quickly anointing a successor, assured that his knowledge and vitality will pass from this life into The Autobot Matrix of Leadership. This gleaming, crystal device a holy Cybertronian relic that promises relief in times of insurmountable hardship, inspiring a kind of religious reverence that crosses faction divides. That Prime was content to die then. It is we, the audience, who demand that he return in increasingly implausible and less impressive ways. Similarly, the vision quest that Prime is poked down by his haranguing celestial overseer is not a tapestry of phantoms drawn from this dying robot's memories. Although we are suddenly transmitted into speculative moments of the Cybertronian civil war, the characters within them enjoy an agency that is both distinct from the events of the preceding feature and the voyage of enlightenment that Prime has been bullied into. These are not archetypes, within a fading consciousness, pulling this trembling mind in different directions.
A battered and bloodied Bumblebee begs Prime not to depart while a beautifully rendered Megatron - who looks almost exactly like a John Stokes illustration from the 1986 UK Annual - is seen, in an aside that follows Prime's decision to depart, to take possession of a discarded Matrix. So, rather than unite the disparate sects of the Cybertronian race through mercy and understanding - perhaps even reestablishing some common ground with the D-16 aspect of Megatron, introduced in Transformers One - or physically pass the Matrix to another young subordinate, this Prime tosses the Godly relic into a boiling pit and removes himself from the equation. Presumably, the filmmakers believe this divine vestige is a weapon? Wassung's film then preaches self-sabotaging pacifism in the face of genocidal violence - doing so with pat allusions to a cyclical violence that our lead character does very little to perpetuate - and is, in this particular moment, genuinely disturbing. An affection for Peter Cullen's crackling performance (and Frank Welker's come to mention it), as well as the weight of real-life events, smooth over this bizarre axial shift but it's difficult to shake the impression that, somewhere along the way, this piece was designed to function as a jumping off point rather than a sainted conclusion; a misbegotten pilot for an ongoing Transformers series without Cullen or his Prime. Such harsh economic considerations are nothing new for a property that has made it its business to sweep old toys off the animated tie-in board the second they're no longer for sale (no matter how beloved they are) but it registers as completely baffling that we are all supposed to solemnly nod that a fitting denouement for this character and that performance is to imagine that, in some tangential continuity, they never existed at all.
