Animation films with a gritty, imperfect style have become far more mainstream since Into The Spiderverse. The sort of asymmetrical and janky design choices that are often seen on less famous films have made their way firmly into the movie theatres. Visual styles almost reminiscent of Paul Berry’s The Sandman and other lesser known animation films are now the vista chosen by large production houses for their feature films. But I’m sure some people working on these latest works are consciously influenced by the earlier ones that may not have made it into the theatre at the time. Watching the Oscar nominated animated shorts has become a far cooler activity. Kobe Bryant helped out there. Back in the early 1990’s it wasn’t exactly the same.
Anyway, this film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is fantastic. Of course the aesthetic appeal is real. The approach to the visual design is something I thoroughly enjoyed. The characters with angled lines and odd ratios (they’re meant to be mutants after all so why would they be perfectly symmetrical and proportional mutants?) gave the movie a grip on my attentive eyesight. It’s eye-catching to have that 3D work rendered to give a 2D appearance and then adding almost childlike 2D scribbles overlaid on top for the fleeting action, like a light bulb flickering, dust clouds or other atmospheric occurrences that don’t last too long.
Animate this all on 2’s as well. For generations the goal of animation was to make the movement and appearance more lifelike by animating on 1’s. The smooth motion made the audience feel more at ease. It was attractive. For the mid to late 20th century that was an acceptable state of affairs. Things could be cartoony, never lose the squash and stretch or absurd anticipation, that’s what makes them far more enjoyable to watch than many live action flicks, but the majority of mainstream movies kept things symmetrical and clean. Get to 1’s and don’t look back. Animating on 2’s is for art students and the experimental.
But nowadays, nearing the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we’re far more accustomed to disarray. We see it in reality all day and we’re incorporating it into our art. Into The Spiderverse did this most famously with the jagged movements and crashing conglomerations of various visual styles that represent each Spider person’s home world. But the sequel lost the aesthetic plot somewhat. At times I worried it may induce an epileptic fit.
Meanwhile, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem struck an almost perfect balance between where to add a bit of visual chaos and where to tone it down. But every film, regardless of the aesthetic innovation it provides, needs a strong narrative if it is to truly capture the audience’s attention. Not a feature the TMNT movies from the 1990’s could really boast of. Not that it mattered to me as a young ape. They were spectacle and surprise. Back then bringing animated characters to live action was a miraculous achievement. Even if they looked shite.
Now the audience is a bit more discerning in their opinions. During the 20th century the screen came into being, but it stayed put. We only watched it when we sequestered the time and space. In the contemporary world every kid has a high definition screen sitting in their pocket. It’s a vastly different approach. But the hook that holds human attention is story. Whether the screen is in your pocket, your lounge or your local mall’s cinema, the feature that will truly capture your focus will be the story.
TMNT: Mutant Mayhem has an incredible story. Strong in its simplicity. While the 1990’s needed organised crime to stack the stakes high enough to suspend disbelief, in the 2020’s it seems more writers are getting to the core of the matter. What do you really want? It’s a question few humans can answer because they’re confused and riddled with anxiety (rightly so, the world’s design evokes it out of your psyche like leeches do blood). Apply this universal question to a group of teenage mutants and you get a simple but pure and powerful answer: acceptance. Remember, these are teenagers, living in the sewer. It’s not like they have a great life.
While keeping it fun and light but using a gritty and grimy artistic style to match the setting of New York City’s sewer system, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem does a great job of resetting the franchise into a medium that can tell the story best. Not because live action ninja turtles look like crap (although they do, whether they’re on set costumes from the 90’s or that CGI porn that is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from 2014), but because the boundaries of animation are far more removed from our day-to-day reality and so the human mind is far more accepting of the absurd. It’s the origin story the turtles needed. So did Splinter. I’m looking forward to the next instalment.
