TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM Director Discusses the Film's Concept Art Animation Style

I sure do love what is happening with animated movies these days. There’s a lot of cool experimentation going on with different animation styles that are breaking the mold of what we’re used to seeing. The Spider-Verse franchises and Michelle vs. The Machines have done some really cool stuff and now the upcoming film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is leaning into that wild and radical art style.

Producers Seth Rogen, Jeff Rowe, and Evan Goldberg wanted to update the Ninja Turtles franchise for a whole new generation and also tell a fun and relevant story. They wanted to art style to look like concept art or doodle-type drawings that people might have scribbled in a notebook while sitting in class in high school.

Director Jeff Rowe recently talked about the animation style with Variety saying that they wanted it to have an imperfect feel to it.

“I think for us, artistically, it was a reaction to a 30-year trend in 3D CG animation to push towards photorealism and hyper-realistic lighting and texturing. The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Then, a few years ago, ‘(Spider-Man:) Into the Spider-Verse’ happened, and that showed that a movie can look like the concept artwork and can be critically and financially successful. That opened a lot of doors and I think we tried to take that football and run with it on ‘Mitchells,’ and then on ‘Turtles,’ I tried to be even less compromising. 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. 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. It’s the kind of drawing you do before you have that voice in your head that says, ‘Don’t do that. That’s not how you draw.’ We wanted to design a film that had that level of unfettered expression. And then it was just a lot of designing it and convincing a lot of really talented artists that it was OK to make mistakes, and that those were actually features not bugs.” 

Animating this sketchy, unfinished art style wasn’t easy, and according to production designer Yashar Kassai, it was the most difficult part of the production:

“The thing that felt so wrong in the beginning was telling my very highly trained, skillful artists who are also ultra-talented that, because we’re drawing like teenagers, 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. But once everyone relinquished the conventional design wisdom of animation, we had a lot of fun.”

It’s explained that this film tells a coming-of-age origin story about teenagers who experience feelings of isolation, loneliness, and awkwardness as they try to find themselves. They also wanted that story to be very emotional for fans and audiences and during their production meetings “they talked about bringing tears to the eyes of viewers when they leave this movie.”

Well, if this movie makes me leave the theater with tears in my eyes, the creative team wins the game because I’ve never cried watching any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Rowe went on to explain: “Being a teenager is inherently an emotional, confusing, lonely time in your life. There’s so much feeling in making these characters real teenagers and we committed to having them voiced by teenagers.”

Kassai went on to say that the main inspiration behind the film was the classic 80s cartoon, saying: “Our Holy Grail of the entire franchise has always been the late ’80s cartoon, the original series, and that really wacky toy line that came out during the early ’90s.” He added:

“We were looking back to the time when sophomoric gross-out humor was the comedic style of the day. So we started there, but then we added the teenage drawing aspect on top of it as a very strong top layer. We were also heavily inspired by films like ‘Chungking Express.’ The Turtles are hiding from humans so it all takes place at night, and these kids have to hide in the shadows because they want to be a part of human society but they feel kind of unsafe when they’re around humans because of what their dad has told them about humans. So they cannot be like on a sunlit beach or on a sunny day in, like, Central Park. We spent a lot of time diversifying what New York at nighttime looks like and giving it a variety of different color schemes.”

Ramsey Naito, president of Nickelodeon Animation and Paramount Animation, goes on to praise the animation: “I think it’s an animation masterpiece and just hilarious and Seth and his team are such a big part of that. It’s a good example of creators coming in to reimagine something that they love. I remember coming back to Nickelodeon and talking about TMNT and we knew the team who worked on it had to be creators who loved TMNT.”

Goldberg went on to talk about how he wanted the characters in the story to be relatable through their real-life struggles, saying:

“They are mutants, they are ninjas, and they are awesome-looking. Overall, though, it is a story about a father and his four brothers who are very different, argue and disagree, but they are a family who are always there for each other. They are doing what they can to make the world a better place and that is what we should be doing. No matter your race, religion, or what type of mutated human-animal hybrid you are, you should be there for your family and do what you can to make the world rad. In a way, we are all Turtles, metaphorically speaking.”  

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, after years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend April O’Neil 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.

When previously talking about the tone of the film, director Jeff Rowe revealed the vibe they were going for: “We wanted it to be like Stand By Me and Lady Bird. But, you know, with Ninja Turtles.”

The voice cast of the film includes Micah Abbey as Donatello, Shamon Brown Jr. as Michelangelo, Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo, Brady Noon as Raphael, Jackie Chan as Splinter, John Cena as Rocksteady, Seth Rogen as Bebop, Ice Cube as Superfly, Rose Byrne as Leatherhead, Natasia Demetriou as Wingnut, Ayo Edebiri as April O’Neil, Giancarlo Esposito as Baxter Stockman, Post Malone as Ray Fillet, Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko, and Maya Rudolph as Cynthia Utrom.

The Seth Rogen-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem hits theaters on August 4th.