You blinked and Transformers started to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Created in 1984 by toy manufacturer Hasbro, the franchise has greatly evolved and today includes animated series, movies, and video games. In order to celebrate the many iterations of the Autobots and Decepticons, the Japanese YouTube channel T-SPARK unveiled a short film titled We Are Not Alone, which tells a standalone story in stop-motion animation. The seven-minute short film is available in full in this article.

The short film is a pretty funny story. It kicks off with two versions of Optimus Prime interacting – one fully transformed and the other enters the scene in truck form and does an impressive transformation. They are standing on top of a desk, and they look at a massive collection of Transformers toys that occupy an entire wall. Then, it looks like they will get attacked by one of the franchise’s main villains, Megatron. But they are all surprised when an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner starts to malfunction and suddenly becomes a vicious enemy that can suck all miniatures into its void.

The story quickly becomes a vicious battle for survival, the likes of which we are used to seeing in the Transformers franchise. Luckily for the action figures, Megatron is able to wake several of them and spring into action. They combine themselves (Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers-style) into the massive Devastator, which we saw in the blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The Devastator is able to match the power of the vacuum cleaner. The original Optimus Prime then steps in and puts an end to the whole battle.

There’s More ‘Transformers’ Coming Our Way

One good reason to celebrate the 40th anniversary is because the Transformers franchise is alive and well. Just recently, the new animated feature film Transformers One became one of the best-reviewed entries in the series – it has an 89% score on Rotten Tomatoes – and raked in over $120 million at the box office. In cinemas, all the movies combined have managed to gross over 5 billion dollars worldwide, and that’s not even factoring in the numbers that the toy line brings in every year.

In the live-action realm, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts teased the beginning of a shared universe with the G.I. Joe franchise. The 2023 movie was planned as the first of a trilogy, and last year the franchise’s producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura told Collider that the next Transformers movie will be the crossover that fans have been waiting for.

You can check out the Transformers short film We Are Not Alone above.

via Collider