New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, Spider-Verse movies change animation for the better

NEW YORK – When TMNT, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film, was released in 2007, critic Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that it offered “an impressive lack of visual texture”.

She was not wrong. The eponymous reptiles are rendered in an inert computer-generated form, as if they were modelled from plastic and then put on a screen. Their green skin is dull and smooth.

The same cannot be said for the turtles in the latest incarnation of the ooze-filled tale – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Aug 31.

In this new film, the heroes – Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael – appear to spring from a (talented) high school doodler’s notebook. Their bodies and faces are rendered with an imperfect, sketchy quality that makes their eyes vivid and their smiles vibrant. Their greenness is distinctive and gains extra contours when reflected in New York’s neon lights.

Mutant Mayhem, directed and co-written by Jeff Rowe, is representative of a larger shift that has occurred in the 16 years since TMNT was released. It is part of a wave of films that proves computer-generated animation does not have to look quite so, well, boring.

So what happened? Well, in 2018, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse was released. Together with its even more technically virtuosic sequel, 2023’s Across The Spider-Verse, they bucked the trend of modern animation by invoking its hero’s comic-book origins with Ben-Day dots and wild, hallucinogenic sequences.

Since Into The Spider-Verse became a box office hit and an Oscar winner, major studios have grown less fearful of animation that diverges from the norm. The film proved that audiences would not reject projects that look markedly different from the house styles of Pixar (Toy Story, 1995 to 2019) and DreamWorks (Shrek, 2001 to 2010). Films like Mutant Mayhem, The Mitchells Vs The Machines (2021), Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022) and Nimona (2023) have distinctive looks that are visually sensational without conforming to established playbooks.

It is exciting for the film-makers too. “All animators did before that was have lunch with one another and talk about how all animated movies look the same,” said The Mitchells director Mike Rianda in an interview.

Rianda – who worked on that movie alongside Rowe, its co-director – was developing it at Sony Pictures Animation while Into The Spider-Verse was in the works. Both were produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and The Mitchells was eventually released on Netflix.

The Mitchells, about a kooky family’s road trip during an AI takeover, looks like a window into the overstimulated mind of its teenage hero, film geek Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) – and Rianda and Rowe wanted the animation to have all of her quirks.

They felt that the humans should look imperfect and asymmetrical rather than like Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004 and 2018), because the plot concerned a battle between Homo sapiens weirdos and regulated robots.

Still, there was pressure from the studio to go the standard route. “That’s easy,” Rianda said. “The computer knows how to do that. It’s already been taught that. It was wonderful to have Spider-Verse going on in the next room, so we could point to it and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. We can do it too, right?’”

Films like Into The Spider-Verse, and those that have followed in its footsteps, blend animation techniques that are common in 3D computer-generated movies with those that were commonplace in the 2D hand-drawn animation that preceded it. It is not just that the images are less photorealistic, but the movements of the characters are as well. The results are more broadly impressionistic in the ways that Looney Tunes cartoons, Disney classics or decades of anime have been.

For instance, when the cat hero of Puss In Boots: The Last Wish sticks his sword into the thumbnail of a giant in the bravura musical opening sequence, the sky goes yellow as the giant gasps with pain. The giant’s thumb turns red, and white lines reverberate in the background mimicking the throbbing.

Rowe’s initial goal for Mutant Mayhem was to just be as bold as possible, excising any timidity he had felt about pushing boundaries on The Mitchells. As he spent more time working on the world of the Turtles, he figured out where those impulses were coming from and how they would fit into the story. He and the production designer, Yashar Kassai, rediscovered drawings they had done as teenagers.

“There’s just this unmitigated expression and honesty to those kinds of drawings,” said Rowe. “It’s a movie about teenagers. Let’s commit to the art style looking like it was made by teenagers. Ideally, the world and the characters will look like they drew themselves.”

When the turtles jump across rooftops, the moon behind them appears to be vibrating scribbles. You can see (digital) pen lines in explosions and expressions.

“At first, Spider-Verse gave people permission,” Rowe said. “And now, with Spider-Verse 2, it’s made it a mandate. If anyone makes a film that looks like a 3D animation film from the last 30 years now, it’s going to feel dated.” NYTIMES

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem opens in cinemas on Aug 31.