Director Josh Cooley — whose Toy Story 4 won the Oscar for Best Animated Film — has been hired by Paramount to direct a Transformers animated prequel.

According to Deadline, who first reported the news, the script for the Transformers animated prequel was written by Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari, the same writers who worked on Ant-Man and were the credited writers on Ant-Man and the Wasp. Hasbro/eOne is running point on the production of this film.

Sources close to the project say that the film will be an origin story. It will place on Cybertron, the planet from which the Autobots and Decepticons both came. The Transformers prequel film will focus on the relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron.

This animated prequel film will be completely separate and apart from the two live-action Transformers films that were announced earlier this year.

The previously announced live-action Transformers films that will be based on Beast Wars and the Bumblebee spinoff are still currently on the fast track.

Though the coronavirus pandemic has shut down all major live-action productions, animated productions are still able to continue work.

For that reason, when Paramount began to develop a plan for restarting production for its Transformers franchise, it became obvious that making a large-scale animated feature film would be easier than a live-action tentpole movie because so much of the work can be done while adhering to social distancing guidelines.

As a result, work on the Transformers animated prequel film has been accelerated. Director Josh Cooley is currently overseeing a final draft with the writers now.