This was and still is how a cartoon movie SHOULD be done. I remember going to see this with my grandfather as a 9 year old TF man many moons ago and I had never seen anything like it. The animation was so much better than the original TV shows and the synth/rock soundtrack accompanied the action and story perfectly.
The Autobots are fighting for their existence against a Decpticon army determined to defeat their rivals once and for all, but while this is happening the planet eater, Unicron is fast approaching the Transformer's home planet of Cybertron, devouring everything in it's path.
The storyline, for an animation, is leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of plots that you get in cartoon movies nowadays and it also gets quite violent in places, Starscream's coronation proving that point.
TF: The Movie also has a voice cast that you just could not dream of getting now (and was also Orson Welles' last ever movie before he died, as he did so whilst filming, with Leonard Nimoy providing the rest of Unicron's vocals, although you'd be hard pushed to tell). Welles, Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Robert Stack and of course Cullen and Welker as Megatron and Prime.
Sure, I may be a little biased, or even be looking through rose tinted glasses, but at the end of the day this movie created a generation of TF lovers and was to us what Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh is to the kids nowadays. The only difference is ours had a bit more grit and fun to it. The 2 disc special edition has had a complete Cel by Cel clean up and had the sound redone after the poor conversion done for the Reconstructed DVD and is the most perfect version of the movie yet.
This movie is essential for all of the children of the 80's who grew up with TVam and Why Don't You?, but with the live action movie on the horizon, it's maybe one to get for your own kids, to show them where the origins of this year's blockbuster came from.
This Spec. Ed. is like the Autobot Matrix, a whole lot of goodness trapped inside a hard case. BUY IT!!!