Across The Spider-Verse's Success Helped Make TMNT: Mutant Mayhem Possible

It is an unfortunate fact that Hollywood is very risk-averse, particularly when it comes to animation. For years, the big studios would make rather formulaic films and try to replicate the success of anything that popped, from Disney and their musicals to DreamWorks and comedies with pop culture references a la "Shrek." After the brief moment in the late '90s and early '00s when ambitious sci-fi adventure epics like "Atlantis" and "Titan A.E." failed financially, all studios started doing visually similar 3D CG movies.

That all changed, of course, when "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" came out. Not that there weren't other movies trying different things, of course. "The Peanuts Movie" also delivered stunning 3D visuals with 2D textures, while "Rango" delivered photo-realistic animation on a level not even Disney was doing, inside a rather mature Western adventure. And yet not many people saw either of these, and neither received the level of commercial, critical, or awards success "Spider-Verse" received.

Since 2018, more studios have experimented with the art form, delivering visually inventive films like "The Mitchells vs. the Machines," or "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish," the latter of which also delivered a far more mature movie with higher stakes than any other DreamWorks movie at the time, with inventive visuals that deviate from the "perfect" CGI animation that audiences have become used to. It's not that they were trying to replicate "Spider-Verse," it was that Miles Morales' tale opened the door and proved you could deviate from the norm and be successful. 

The latest film to follow in these footsteps is "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," which debuted a work-in-progress cut at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival earlier this month to tremendous applause.

"['Spider-Verse'] convinced studios that you can make money, win awards and be successful," said "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" writer/director Jeff Rowe in an interview for the latest issue of Total Film magazine. 

As Rowe points out, a big part of the visual language of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" is the way it approximates a teenager's sketchbook, with every surface of the 3D animated film resembling hand-drawn sketches, from the VFX to the world itself, with vehicles and furniture and more all covered in sketched-out lines, aiding in enhancing the film's teenage attitude. 

"We looked at drawings we all did when we were in high school — the way you sketch things before you know how to draw. And we were like, 'That's a really cool technique. We should make the movie look like that, and then spend millions of dollars to make it look really slick and professional!'" 

That's the paradox at the heart of "Mutant Mayhem." This is a film that simultaneously looks "slick and professional," but also aesthetically imperfect, like a teenager's drawings. Every character could be considered ugly compared to many other studio-animated movies, from the human characters to the many mutants in the film to the turtles themselves, who finally get unique designs that differentiate each and every one of them. You no longer have to go by bandana color or weapon choice, but the audience can instantly recognize each turtle by their body type and personality.

As Rowe added, "We have so many mutants in the movie, and we're really using the capabilities of animation to deliver on these unhinged character designs." He's right — as we've seen in the trailers, even when you meet familiar characters, they are not exactly what you might remember.

To be clear, "Across the Spider-Verse" takes its franchise to new visual heights and seems to be on a path to even bigger commercial success. Whether this means studios will ask for just something that looks just like "Spider-Verse" or creatives continue to push in different directions remains to be seen, but movies like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," "The Bad Guys," and "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" show there's still hope for mainstream American studio animation.

"I hope every film looks different now," Rowe stated in the interview. "I hope the idea of a studio having a house style disappears." So do we, Mr. Rowe. So do we. Based on the aforementioned movies, as well as new titles like Illumination's "Migration" and even the most traditionalist studios like Disney starting to experiment with visuals in their feature films with the upcoming "Wish," his hopes may be slowly becoming a reality.

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" skates into theaters on August 2, 2023. Cowabunga, dudes!