Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Filmmakers Wanted Animation To Be 'Sketchy And Imperfect And Misshapen'

This year has been a blessing for animation fans. "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" surpassed expectations and became the biggest movie of the summer, "Nimona" finally was released on Netflix after Disney killed it, "Suzume" saw an anime maestro come full circle, "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" made a crap ton of money, and "The First Slam Dunk" defeated "The Way of Water" at the box office with an incredible sports anime that paid off nearly 30-year-old storylines.

Next up is "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," the latest animated attempt at updating the classic characters to a new generation ("Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie" was released just last year). I managed to see a work-in-progress screening at Annecy earlier this year and can say this is an incredible film, and a pure gift to animation fans. 

Part of what makes this movie stand out is its visual style, with the 3D animation looking like doodles you'd do in a notebook as a teenager in class, something director Jeff Rowe says is a reaction to the push towards photorealism in 3D CG films. 

"We decided we wanted this movie to look exactly like a concept artwork, and we want the concept artwork to feel distinctly human and not computer-generated," Rowe told Variety. "And that means sketchy and imperfect and misshapen and reminiscent of the way you draw when you're a child or a teenager, and your passion and enthusiasm for making art hasn't been dimmed by formal art training."

This is the revolution that "Into the Spider-Verse" started. Not that other movies began to copy it, but that it allowed other American studio movies to experiment with their visuals and deviate from what became the norm in the 3D CG landscape, while also making a lot of money. As Rowe said, the animated superhero movie "showed that a movie can look like the concept artwork and can be critically and financially successful. That opened a lot of doors."

Now, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" is following in those footsteps by delivering a kinetic, hilarious, and heartfelt superhero origin story that truly makes the ninja turtles feel like actual teenagers, casting kids to voice the characters and recording them together to properly capture the spontaneity of youth. This is one of few iterations of the franchise where each of the turtles actually looks distinct from one another, with their personality informing their character designs.

The problem, according to production designer Yashar Kassai, was convincing the "very highly trained, skillful artists who are also ultra-talented"  involved with the film to, well, draw poorly. "We're drawing like teenagers, [I'd tell them] I need you to draw that again but I need you to peel away all those years you spent in art school learning your craft and draw like your 15-year-old self," Kassai said. "But once everyone relinquished the conventional design wisdom of animation, we had a lot of fun."

Indeed, the final product is full of sketched-out textures in the environment, and the characters themselves have designs that don't look symmetrical or conventionally attractive, but like what a rebellious teenager would picture the world as in their imagination. 

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" will cowabunga into theaters on August 2, 2023.