The Influence of Italian Cubism (Picasso, etc) on Michael Bay's Transformers

[DA_Champion]

http://smugfilm.com/michael-bay-futurist/
Michael Bay: Futurist
Posted on May 16, 2014 by John D'Amico

Michael Bay is one of the best in the world at depicting motion, and the Transformers series, for all its storytelling incompetence, may be his masterpiece in this regard. The series, particularly Transformers 3, are all in theory a battle between good guys and bad guys, each named and catalogued with action figures and stats. But unlike the pedantic Pacific Rim—which is an accountant’s analysis of a fight—Transformers, in practice, throws all that away and becomes essentially a long series of swirling lights and noises. It’s the explosion of color through time. It’s beyond the infinite.

A lot of people before me have pointed out a Cubist influence to the transformation sequences in the Transformers movies, and they’re right—Bay throws away Euclidian perspective like the Cubists did. But I want to define that more tightly—these films are not just Cubist, they’re examples of a specific branch of Cubism called Futurism. Transformers has made Michael Bay a Futurist.

Compare Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Man’s Head with the dynamism of the head of a Transformer. Split, cubed, locked in multiple perspectives and angles all at once, frozen in eternal, omnipresent speed:

Dynamism of a Man’s Head, 1913

Like Fortunato Depero, Michael Bay crowds portraits with hard lines crossing through his subject:

Martinetti, Patriotic Storm, 1924 (detail)

 

[RetrogradeOrbit]

Balls to Cubism!

 

[jonathancrane]

Technically, it would be the CGI artists responsible for the alleged Cubist influence, not Bay. I seriously doubt Bay understands Cubism.

 

[Pink Ranger]

I think Bay was influenced by Giger, who in turn was likely influenced by the Cubists (especially Dali, though he was Spanish), but I think the writer cited in the OP is missing an important intermediate influence there.