Go ninja, go
There's a very strong argument to be made that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best feature film yet made featuring the titular comic book superheroes, TV cartoon stars, and best-selling toys. This isn't such a big deal as all that, given that there's also an argument to be made that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the first time in seven features that one of them has been actually "good" in the first place. Still, it's a testimony to how doggedly this somewhat generic franchise has somehow clung to life for nearly four decades that we can be this far along into its lifespan without having hit the ceiling for quality.
It helps, I am sure, that for only the second time (following 2007's TMNT), we get a fully-animated version of these comic book characters in a theatrical film, so there's no need to worry about overly weighty suits or weightless CGI. It also helps that Mutant Mayhem is secretly a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg film as much as it's anything else - they represent two-fifths of the credited writers, and two-thirds of the producers - and there's always been a strong vein of thick, meaty nostalgia for the pop culture of the late '80s and early '90s in Rogen & Goldberg's work. And the rest of the main creative team - the other writers include Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit and Jeff Rowe, the last of whom makes his solo directing debut here after having co-directed The Mitchells vs. the Machines - are also a bunch of '90s Kids™, so the whole thing feels pretty unmistakably like it comes from a place of fanboyish enthusiasm. But not solely enthusiasm based in nostalgia for the 1987-'96 television cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I think still probably counts as the definitive incarnation of the franchise in the popular imagination. Part of the charm of Mutant Mayhem - and, if I am being mercilessly honest, part of what's annoying about it as well - is that it tries to give equal time to nostalgia for every era of children who grew up on the Turtles, be they from the '80s, the '90s, the '00s, or the '10s. Just about the only era of popular culture from the last 40 years that I don't think gets a reference is the one we're presently living in, the one that would be comprehensible to the children who are the film's stated target audience, but you know kids, they just watch stuff because it's brightly colored.
No slight to the kids: I also just watch stuff because it's brightly colored, and Mutant Mayhem happens to look pretty damn great. This is, after 2022's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the second major American animated feature that it's basically impossible to imagine existing without the trailblazing work done by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, demonstrating that you can actually have, like, an aesthetic with computer animation. But whereas The Last Wish took at that about as far as "...so, we can sometimes use a lower frame-rate?", Mutant Mayhem has a much more comprehensive visual scheme in mind, starting as Into the Spider-Verse did with a specific genre of graphic arts as its guiding principle. In this case, that genre is "notebook sketches made by a kid who is just completely checked out from school and has a fairly stunted and immature sense of what's 'cool', but has enough artistic talent to make it look pretty neat anyway". Which feels both hyper-specific and not, but at any rate, it's definitely a vibe, and it's the exact vibe that Rogen and Goldberg have made careers out of. So the film has a very distinct unity between its look and its overall attitude, especially its agreeably dopey sense of humor.
Anyway, having an aesthetic program is one thing, successfully executing it is another, and Mutant Mayhem is pretty damn successful - all the more impressive since this isn't coming from any sort of pedigreed animation studio. The production was split between two companies: the Paris and Montreal studios of Mikros Animation, and the Vancouver studio of Cinesite, and I do not wish to cast aspersions on the artists employed by these people, but if you looked at their respective filmographies, I don't suppose you'd get very excited: stuff like Sherlock Gnomes and PAW Patrol: The Movie from Mikros, stuff like The Star, The Addams Family, and Paws of Fury from Cinesite. I bring up these titles not to shame the studios, but to praise them: turns out that if you make some real demands of companies like these, they can live up to those demands quite nicely. Mutant Mayhem wants to have a scrawled, messy, hand-drawn style moving smoothly and gracefully (well, smoothly absent the reduced framerate, at least); here it is. It wants to convert some very circular, loopy drawings that feel like scribbles made in a hurry into plausible three-dimensional models; this has been done. The film's look is kind of purposefully ugly, and I have my own reservations about that: I don't really love to look at any of the characters who aren't the turtles themselves, and I would say that I fully hate looking at any of the humans. And even at just 99 minutes (good Lord, look at that, a summertime comic book movie with a running time no longer than it needs to tell its story!), that's a lot of time looking at things I'd rather not look at. But it's not like the designs were a mistake: this is the style the filmmakers were interested in, and the animation supports it beautifully. Not just in the movement and modeling, either; the texturing also has a nicely crude, handmade feeling, looking like something between permanent markers and poster paints that have smeared and blobbed a bit as they swathe these models in bold colors. Unlike Into the Spider-Verse, and very much unlike fellow 2023 animated feature Across the Spider-Verse, it doesn't try to do multiple things: it pins down the "imaginative slacker's doodles come to life" style and commits to it. And that's obviously not a real problem except insofar as the two Spider-Verses are the specific movies in all the world it's easiest to compare this to, and it comes up wanting in that comparison. But it does feel pretty incredible and bold and groundbreaking for about 10 minutes, and then it seems at least a little bit stuck in a rut for 89 minutes, and that's just the way of it.
So we have an aesthetic, a pretty great one. As for what else we have, it's cute enough. It's not doing much to reinvent the wheel; the biggest shift this makes to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles formula is to make plucky reporter April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri) into a nerve-wracked high-school student aspiring to journalism, mostly in the hopes that it will make her less of an unpopular nerd (and the film for sure gets that "if I become a journalist, people will think I'm cool" is, itself, a pretty ridiculous thing to believe), and I think this change is probably for the best. It lines up April and the turtles more, and lets them all have arcs that comfortably parallel each other, since the main thrust of the story is that the turtles - who feel plausibly like honest-to-God teenagers for the first time in big-screen history - just want to be able to go out into the world without people freaking out at them, and becoming supeheroes seems like a decent way to make that happen. So it's basically all about "doing the right thing for selfish reasons", and that of course means that the characters will all get to the point that they do the right thing for the right reasons, since this is a kids' movie. The turtles themselves, as an unfortunate side effect of being made nervous teens who just want to fit in, have been slightly homogenized in their personalities. The canonical personalities are still visible: Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu) still leads, being a bit of a priggish hall monitor about it, and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown, Jr.) is perceptibly more of a party dude than the others. Raphael (Brady Noon) is neither cooler nor cruder than his brothers, but he is still the one most prone to violent outbursts (if anything, this cartoon makes him seem a bit more unnerving and rageaholic than in the other versions of the material I have encountered). Donatello (Micah Abbey) no longer does machines; he is by far the most diminished by this script, I would say, having been transformed into the "shy nerd" archetype that all of the screenwriters clearly identify with the hardest, and ends up feeling the most like a boilerplate movie teen who doesn't even really benefit from being a mutant ninja turtle.
As for the actual story being told with our slightly indistinct chelonian friends, it's pretty blatantly an excuse for the writers to show that they collected all the toys, and the subtitle Mutant Mayhem isn't screwing around: the movie's main goal is to cram as many side characters in as it can. There's a housefly that has been transformed into a criminal genius by being exposed to experimental mutagen, calling himself Superfly (Ice Cube); he's gathered up all of the other animals that have been made into humanoid mutants through exposure to the mutagen, and is terrorising New York; I won't list them all, but there are eight, and that's not counting the turtles and their rat mentor Splinter (Jackie Chan), who is quite a neurotic killjoy in this telling, and suffers from the ugliest design of any character in the movie, so basically it's just a huge bummer whenever we see him. At any rate, it's a lot of mutants - a mayhem of them, even - and it basically leaves the movie with no room to do much of anything besides leap from one comic action setpiece to another, getting to its big kaiju finale as efficiently and swiftly as it dares. It is, if nothing else, absolutely never dull; it doesn't slow down enough for that. What it is instead is a bit manic and cluttered, constantly slinging movement and noise and music and one-liners to make sure that it remains energetic throughout. There's something a bit stiff and inorganic about these things, especially the jokes and music cues: the reference points are clearly the reference points of middle-aged people, and at a certain point, especially with the music, one gets the impression that they're all doing it on purpose: "haha, kids, I sure am a middle aged dude with lame taste, right?" A weird gesture, but halfway through the epic 4 Non Blondes action scene, you can't ignore that it surely has to be intentional. But everybody involved is plainly having fun, and it's neat to look at, and it zips by with kinetic energy that nothing else starring these characters ever has. Not really anything special, but it's an easy sit.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
It helps, I am sure, that for only the second time (following 2007's TMNT), we get a fully-animated version of these comic book characters in a theatrical film, so there's no need to worry about overly weighty suits or weightless CGI. It also helps that Mutant Mayhem is secretly a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg film as much as it's anything else - they represent two-fifths of the credited writers, and two-thirds of the producers - and there's always been a strong vein of thick, meaty nostalgia for the pop culture of the late '80s and early '90s in Rogen & Goldberg's work. And the rest of the main creative team - the other writers include Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit and Jeff Rowe, the last of whom makes his solo directing debut here after having co-directed The Mitchells vs. the Machines - are also a bunch of '90s Kids™, so the whole thing feels pretty unmistakably like it comes from a place of fanboyish enthusiasm. But not solely enthusiasm based in nostalgia for the 1987-'96 television cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I think still probably counts as the definitive incarnation of the franchise in the popular imagination. Part of the charm of Mutant Mayhem - and, if I am being mercilessly honest, part of what's annoying about it as well - is that it tries to give equal time to nostalgia for every era of children who grew up on the Turtles, be they from the '80s, the '90s, the '00s, or the '10s. Just about the only era of popular culture from the last 40 years that I don't think gets a reference is the one we're presently living in, the one that would be comprehensible to the children who are the film's stated target audience, but you know kids, they just watch stuff because it's brightly colored.
No slight to the kids: I also just watch stuff because it's brightly colored, and Mutant Mayhem happens to look pretty damn great. This is, after 2022's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the second major American animated feature that it's basically impossible to imagine existing without the trailblazing work done by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, demonstrating that you can actually have, like, an aesthetic with computer animation. But whereas The Last Wish took at that about as far as "...so, we can sometimes use a lower frame-rate?", Mutant Mayhem has a much more comprehensive visual scheme in mind, starting as Into the Spider-Verse did with a specific genre of graphic arts as its guiding principle. In this case, that genre is "notebook sketches made by a kid who is just completely checked out from school and has a fairly stunted and immature sense of what's 'cool', but has enough artistic talent to make it look pretty neat anyway". Which feels both hyper-specific and not, but at any rate, it's definitely a vibe, and it's the exact vibe that Rogen and Goldberg have made careers out of. So the film has a very distinct unity between its look and its overall attitude, especially its agreeably dopey sense of humor.
Anyway, having an aesthetic program is one thing, successfully executing it is another, and Mutant Mayhem is pretty damn successful - all the more impressive since this isn't coming from any sort of pedigreed animation studio. The production was split between two companies: the Paris and Montreal studios of Mikros Animation, and the Vancouver studio of Cinesite, and I do not wish to cast aspersions on the artists employed by these people, but if you looked at their respective filmographies, I don't suppose you'd get very excited: stuff like Sherlock Gnomes and PAW Patrol: The Movie from Mikros, stuff like The Star, The Addams Family, and Paws of Fury from Cinesite. I bring up these titles not to shame the studios, but to praise them: turns out that if you make some real demands of companies like these, they can live up to those demands quite nicely. Mutant Mayhem wants to have a scrawled, messy, hand-drawn style moving smoothly and gracefully (well, smoothly absent the reduced framerate, at least); here it is. It wants to convert some very circular, loopy drawings that feel like scribbles made in a hurry into plausible three-dimensional models; this has been done. The film's look is kind of purposefully ugly, and I have my own reservations about that: I don't really love to look at any of the characters who aren't the turtles themselves, and I would say that I fully hate looking at any of the humans. And even at just 99 minutes (good Lord, look at that, a summertime comic book movie with a running time no longer than it needs to tell its story!), that's a lot of time looking at things I'd rather not look at. But it's not like the designs were a mistake: this is the style the filmmakers were interested in, and the animation supports it beautifully. Not just in the movement and modeling, either; the texturing also has a nicely crude, handmade feeling, looking like something between permanent markers and poster paints that have smeared and blobbed a bit as they swathe these models in bold colors. Unlike Into the Spider-Verse, and very much unlike fellow 2023 animated feature Across the Spider-Verse, it doesn't try to do multiple things: it pins down the "imaginative slacker's doodles come to life" style and commits to it. And that's obviously not a real problem except insofar as the two Spider-Verses are the specific movies in all the world it's easiest to compare this to, and it comes up wanting in that comparison. But it does feel pretty incredible and bold and groundbreaking for about 10 minutes, and then it seems at least a little bit stuck in a rut for 89 minutes, and that's just the way of it.
So we have an aesthetic, a pretty great one. As for what else we have, it's cute enough. It's not doing much to reinvent the wheel; the biggest shift this makes to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles formula is to make plucky reporter April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri) into a nerve-wracked high-school student aspiring to journalism, mostly in the hopes that it will make her less of an unpopular nerd (and the film for sure gets that "if I become a journalist, people will think I'm cool" is, itself, a pretty ridiculous thing to believe), and I think this change is probably for the best. It lines up April and the turtles more, and lets them all have arcs that comfortably parallel each other, since the main thrust of the story is that the turtles - who feel plausibly like honest-to-God teenagers for the first time in big-screen history - just want to be able to go out into the world without people freaking out at them, and becoming supeheroes seems like a decent way to make that happen. So it's basically all about "doing the right thing for selfish reasons", and that of course means that the characters will all get to the point that they do the right thing for the right reasons, since this is a kids' movie. The turtles themselves, as an unfortunate side effect of being made nervous teens who just want to fit in, have been slightly homogenized in their personalities. The canonical personalities are still visible: Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu) still leads, being a bit of a priggish hall monitor about it, and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown, Jr.) is perceptibly more of a party dude than the others. Raphael (Brady Noon) is neither cooler nor cruder than his brothers, but he is still the one most prone to violent outbursts (if anything, this cartoon makes him seem a bit more unnerving and rageaholic than in the other versions of the material I have encountered). Donatello (Micah Abbey) no longer does machines; he is by far the most diminished by this script, I would say, having been transformed into the "shy nerd" archetype that all of the screenwriters clearly identify with the hardest, and ends up feeling the most like a boilerplate movie teen who doesn't even really benefit from being a mutant ninja turtle.
As for the actual story being told with our slightly indistinct chelonian friends, it's pretty blatantly an excuse for the writers to show that they collected all the toys, and the subtitle Mutant Mayhem isn't screwing around: the movie's main goal is to cram as many side characters in as it can. There's a housefly that has been transformed into a criminal genius by being exposed to experimental mutagen, calling himself Superfly (Ice Cube); he's gathered up all of the other animals that have been made into humanoid mutants through exposure to the mutagen, and is terrorising New York; I won't list them all, but there are eight, and that's not counting the turtles and their rat mentor Splinter (Jackie Chan), who is quite a neurotic killjoy in this telling, and suffers from the ugliest design of any character in the movie, so basically it's just a huge bummer whenever we see him. At any rate, it's a lot of mutants - a mayhem of them, even - and it basically leaves the movie with no room to do much of anything besides leap from one comic action setpiece to another, getting to its big kaiju finale as efficiently and swiftly as it dares. It is, if nothing else, absolutely never dull; it doesn't slow down enough for that. What it is instead is a bit manic and cluttered, constantly slinging movement and noise and music and one-liners to make sure that it remains energetic throughout. There's something a bit stiff and inorganic about these things, especially the jokes and music cues: the reference points are clearly the reference points of middle-aged people, and at a certain point, especially with the music, one gets the impression that they're all doing it on purpose: "haha, kids, I sure am a middle aged dude with lame taste, right?" A weird gesture, but halfway through the epic 4 Non Blondes action scene, you can't ignore that it surely has to be intentional. But everybody involved is plainly having fun, and it's neat to look at, and it zips by with kinetic energy that nothing else starring these characters ever has. Not really anything special, but it's an easy sit.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
