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2023 marks the 40th anniversary of those pizza-loving heroes in a half shell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and in a happy accident of cowabungaian proportions, a new animated film from Nickelodeon Movies and Paramount Pictures is slicing its way out of the Big Apple’s Ooze-infested sewers and onto the silver screen.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrives this month as a late-summer smackdown from director Jeff Rowe, co-director Kyler Spears and executive producers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Weaver. Its raw urban environment and kinetic tone was created to capture a gritty cityscape where more youthful versions of Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo could carve out a new home within the $15 billion Turtles empire created in 1983 by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman for Mirage Comics.
Featuring a terrific garage band score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the new pic finds the Turtle bros Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello and Michelangelo (voiced by real-life teens Brady Noon, Nicolas Cantu, Micah Abbey and Shamon Brown Jr.) setting out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend, April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) helps them take on a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.
The stellar cast also includes Jackie Chan (Master Splinter), Ice Cube (Superfly), Seth Rogen (Bebop), John Cena (Rocksteady), Rose Byrne (Leatherhead), Paul Rudd (Mondo Gecko), Post Malone (Ray Fillet), Natasia Demetriou (Wingnut), Giancarlo Esposito (Baxter Stockman) and Hannibal Buress (Genghis Frog).
Gnarly Teenagers
“The first tentpole we planted in the ground was authenticity,” Rowe tells Animation Magazine. “We wanted it to be a real coming-of-age teenage movie. Past versions of the Turtles have been muscular and ripped, and few teenagers are as jacked as many of the Ninja Turtles have been. They need to look like real teens. Lanky. Awkward. Maybe not comfortable in their bodies yet.”
Rowe, who is best known for co-directing the 2021 Sony/Netflix hit The Mitchells vs. the Machines and working on acclaimed shows such as Disenchantment and Gravity Falls, said he and his Nickelodeon team made the decision to cast actual teenagers in the Ninja Turtles roles for the first time, which shockingly had not been done before. Then in selecting an appropriate visual style, they took inspiration from Sony’s Spider-Verse movies.
‘We found ourselves going back to sketches you make when you’re a teenager before you really know how to draw … We thought, “What if we made a multi-million-dollar movie look like these rough drawings and be misshapen and lumpy and human?”‘
— Director Jeff Rowe
“Something that was successful about Spider-Verse was that they had this North Star comic book look,” he explains. “So, we wondered what our North Star was. If we could make this movie look like anything, what would it be? And we found ourselves going back to sketches you make when you’re a teenager before you really know how to draw. The incredible thing about those drawings is that they’re so passionate. We thought, ‘What if we made a multi-million-dollar movie look like these rough drawings and be misshapen and lumpy and human?’”
Weeding through four decades of Ninja Turtles comics, games, toys, action figures, films and animated series to extract the franchise’s core appeal was a herculean task for the creative gang. “The Ninja Turtles have never been cool, which is what makes them cool,” Rowe adds. “They’re weird. The art style is not like a slick, polished, perfectly drawn thing. They’ve always been a bit silly and old-fashioned and that’s something I adore about it. There’s this period in the early ’90s where gross became an aesthetic, between Creepy Crawlers toys and the Garbage Pail Kids and the Ninja Turtles. There were all these weird mutant toys, and as a kid I loved those inventive designs. They were funny and not trying to take themselves seriously.
“In films, there’s a tendency to make things look tactical and dress them in black. And you need some of that so you feel stakes in the story and understand the world, but we can’t lose the weirdness. People being slimed and huge monsters and eating candy bugs — that’s what this movie draws from.”
All pre-production on Mutant Mayhem took place on the Nickelodeon side and began during the pandemic period, then shifted over to Mikros and Cinesite for the actual CG animation process.
“It became this wonderful opportunity because it completely changed the boundaries of who we could hire,” says Rowe. “For example, we were able to use amazing artist, Sean Sylvester, who did so many of the color keys and character paints. He took a lot of our character designer Woodrow White’s designs, and translated them into something that could exist in 3D and receive light. Sean lived in Scotland, and we found him on Twitter. In a traditional studio world where people are required to be in the office, there’s no world where we could have hired him. He’s a key part of why the movie looks the way it does. We were able to assemble this great team, generate targets here, and give them to Mikros and later Cinesite. We wanted it to feel like we’re all filmmakers co-creating this movie.”
At many points in the production Rowe and company broke with established techniques. They’d look at each other wondering if they were breaking rules and whether they could do this.
“The characters are very textured and they’re on top of textured backgrounds, and that’s generally an animation design no-no,” Rowe says. “The backgrounds can be complex but the characters are simple, or the characters can be complex but the backgrounds have to be simple. We didn’t think it was okay, but it sure looked cool. There were a lot of anxieties up front. It took a lot of faith through a lot of people and many really talented artists locking arms and wanting to be bold and different while seeing it to completion.”
Pairing the carefully conceived characters with natural sounding voice actors was a vital piece of the boundary-pushing puzzle and Mutant Mayhem is blessed with an abundance of vocal talent.
“It was a dream come true,” says the director. “The kids are so naturalistic, and we surrounded them with these icons. Jackie Chan is like Elvis to me! And he’s everything you’d hope he would be. He’s so hard-working and wants to do a good job and get it right. Some of those stars were big asks. I wrote a letter to Jackie Chan and asked him if he wanted to do a Ninja Turtles movie? We had a meeting with Ice Cube and when we told him his character’s name was Superfly, he laughed, and we knew he was in. He later told us that he watched Ninja Turtles a lot with his son as his son grew up, so it was a meaningful franchise to him. He’s very funny, and there’s not a lot of what he says that we can use in a kids’ family movie, but I’m really excited for the world to hear his vocal performance in this.”
‘We let them run loose with frames rates — whatever they wanted, whatever conveyed the feeling we were going for. It culminated with it looking rough, dirty, unprofessional and underdeveloped — just like the Turtles are.’
— Co-director Kyler Spears
Co-director Kyler Spears signed onto the high-profile project because he had worked with Rowe previously on The Mitchells vs the Machines and trusted him immensely. Plus, Mutant Mayhem offered ample opportunities to get wild and crazy.
“You can pause the film at any moment, and it would look like a piece of key artwork from any one of the members of the art team, which was a very common occurrence during meetings,” Spears admits. “High school drawings come to life is another way it’s been described. Let’s take all the qualities of how naïve and inexperienced we were as artists in high school and try to make it look like it was done on purpose. And that translates to the character design and the animation style. We let them run loose with frames rates — whatever they wanted, whatever conveyed the feeling we were going for. It culminated with it looking rough, dirty, unprofessional and underdeveloped — just like the Turtles are.”
Cool Reptiles Hanging Out
With 40 years of Turtles mythology behind that iconic property, Spears worked alongside Rowe to keep the storyline on track while preserving the mystique for fans young and old.
“We focused so long on just trying to make sure that the Turtles felt authentic in talking with each other and relating to each other, that everything they get involved in feels secondary,” he adds. “Their hopes and their dreams and making sure that was relevant to the universal experience of growing up and what a 15-year-old would relate to today. And ensuring that it’s something fans who grew up with the Turtles in the ‘80s and ‘90s would also enjoy. Most of the movie is them hanging out together and talking about how they react to things they just saw.”
“I think people are going to leave the theater hopefully wanting to see it again,” concludes Spears. “There are so many nuances and little details you may miss. Those are things we worked so hard to put in there. It’s a fun, beautiful film with an honest story and gorgeous art that’s so dense that you’ll want to watch it again and again to appreciate new stuff you didn’t notice the first time.”
Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies will release Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in theaters on August 2.
