Taking the four brothers back to their early years, the newest ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ film’s director and his team continually referred to how a teenage boy would handle the situation at hand - sometimes antsy, sometimes psyched, usually bored – in the Paramount Pictures 3DCG action-comedy hitting theaters today, August 2.
Describing the production as “punk rock anarchy hanging together by duct tape,” director Jeff Rowe says Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem provided the chance to get unconventional in both its 3DCG-2D hybrid animation as well as story.
“You'll see families and characters reflected in animated films, and they often feel like they live in model homes,” says Rowe, known for directing Sony Pictures Animation’s hit 3DCG feature, The Mitchells vs the Machines. “Rarely did I see movies in animation that I felt reflected my lower-class, blue-collar, upbringing. Sometimes you just don't have money and that's part of your reality. With Turtles, it was an opportunity to talk about a different kind of family: a father who didn't expect to be a father, who essentially adopted these four kids and is raising them on his own and is maybe not that good of a parent at first but then, through going on this journey, is able to get behind and support his kids and their happiness. That felt like an important story to tell. If I had seen that when I was a kid, I would have felt a little less alone.”
Most know the TMNT franchise story summary: four turtle brothers become humanoid mutants via a mysterious slime, are taken in by a mutant rat karate master, and become New York City’s unorthodox crime-fighting heroes. On paper, it’s a story that few would believe could stand the test of time, let alone thrive for almost 30 years. But, since the comic was first published in 1984, the story has been adapted for video games, manga, one live-action and four animated television series, and seven films, the most recent being Rowe’s illustrative Mutant Mayhem, with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Weaver serving as producers. Clearly, Rowe wasn’t the only fan who identified with the far from traditional familial story.
In Rowe’s rendition of the story – which debuts in U.S. theaters Wednesday, August 2 – Splinter (Jackie Chan) is an unextraordinary rat who comes upon four little turtles in neon green slime. Transformed into a mutant after having contact with the substance, Splinter takes in the turtles and raises them as his children, learning martial arts to help teach and equip his adoptive sons – Donnie, Mikey, Raph, and Leo – for the cruel world of humans. As the four boys age, they become desperate for approval from human teens their age and to live a fuller life outside of their sewer home. After a chance encounter with aspiring teen reporter April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), the turtles learn about a feared crime boss Superfly and decide to take down his operation. But they are blindsided when Superfly turns out to be a mutant as well.
Rowe’s film, produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studios and Paramount Pictures, stands out not only as a reboot, but also as the youngest depiction of the turtle brothers thus far, all portrayed by teen actors, with Micah Abbey as Donatello/Donnie, Shamon Brown Jr. as Michelangelo/Mikey, Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo/Leo, and Brady Noon as Raphael/Raph.
Saturating the film in youth antics was a story goal from early on.
“I remember we had this thing called ‘Movie Club,’ where everyone on the story team would take turns picking a different film to watch and then we’d talk about it every week,” explains Rowe. “I picked the first one: Attack the Block. I was like ‘That's a film that has a real young cast that feels like teenagers. Let's watch that.’ How excited they get and the amount that they physically touch each other and push each other down and jump on each other's shoulders, it captured something really real about that time in your life, especially if you're a young boy. And I was like, ‘That. We need that in the animation. We need that in the performance.’”
But touch is harder to pull off than one would think in 3DCG animation.
“CG models don't actually obey the laws of physics, so hands will just go right through things,” notes Rowe. “So, then you have penetration issues. And then it's hard to light. And it's hard to rotate the camera to make hand contact. And sometimes they aren't even touching, but it looks like it and you just have to use cheats. All that is hard enough for just two characters or even characters with props.”
Then throw in four mutant ninja turtle brothers carrying throwing stars, katana swords, a bow staff, nunchucks, and a pair of sai.
Rowe goes on to share, “I wanted them to just be climbing on each other and shaking each other. When we started recording the actors in ensemble, with the characters all talking over each other, it gave the animators such a great guide to injecting that kind of life and energy into the movie. We also didn't want to make it a Leo story, or a Raph story, or emphasize one turtle over the other. We wanted to tell a story of four brothers as four equally main characters. Like in Stand by Me, we're focusing on the unit. And, to communicate that to the audience, the tool we chose was using these long takes that include all four of them and run those shots for a long time.”
One such scene that Rowe remembers well is after the brothers decide to operate as a crime-fighting unit to stop Superfly; they’ve been making their way through criminal group after criminal group, their efforts accompanied by a montage of their kick-assery and have just left a building still amped on the excessive adrenaline coursing through the veins. They are charged up, ready for more, and start chumming around, ripping on each other, pushing each other around, and making up incoherent chants about bacon, egg, and cheese.
“There's a point where Leo even starts talking like a robot and then he starts doing the robot dance,” he says. “That sequence is really long. There's one cut hidden in one of the whip pans at the very end. April's like, ‘Yeah, I don't think this is going to help people like you,’ and then it whips back to the boys who then immediately go back to, ‘Let me get a bacon, egg and cheese.’ There's a cut hidden in there. Because, initially, people were like, we can't have this shot be that long. So, we just cut that joke at the end. And then enough people were like, ‘I miss it. Can we bring it back and just tie the cut?’ Thank God for the animators at Mikros and Cinesite, who rose to the challenge.”
Mikros (The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run) and Cinesite (The Addams Family 2) both handled the sophisticated animation on Mutant Mayhem and, according to Rowe, were very good at “doing a lot of really ambitious, difficult things that blew us away.”
“Three animators worked on that scene,” Rowe reveals. “Marc Andre Benoit did them walking out up until Raph’s line. Nicolas Pinet did the whole ‘bacon egg and cheese’ bit up until the pan to April. And then a third animator, Maxime Koeckx did the whip pan back and final bit with the turtles. All together the scene is over a minute long and there's so much stuff happening to catch it all on one watch-through. You can tell we had fun.”
There’s also plenty to catch with multiple viewings on the animation design itself. From illustrated light textures emphasizing blue light glares from iPhones, lamp light illuminations, and light beams from car headlights to painterly motion blurs, crudely-drawn chest hair and asymmetrical noses, Mutant Mayhem’s design goals included breaking all the rules of art school.
“We wanted the world and the characters to feel like they drew themselves, like they created this world around them,” says Rowe. “Many people have called out, ‘They did not need to make the human beings look this ugly.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, we did.’
Truthfully, most of the humans in the movie look a lot more terrifying than a large mutant rat carrying a litter of mutant turtles in his arms.
“It speaks to the turtles’ emotional reality, as well as Splinter’s emotional reality, and we really had fun with forgoing our art school training,” admits Rowe. “We became very hawk-eyed about seeing traditional design tricks in things. Like, ‘This cloud had three perfect swoops, so you need to mess it up. Break the rules.’ That led to this anarchic style.”
It may be unpolished, but the film’s art style is astounding, considering that the team made a vein-bulging mutant fly’s shimmering eyes look oddly alluring.
“Whenever we were stumped with an art design challenge, like figuring out what Superfly’s eyes looked like, we would ask ourselves, ‘How would a high schooler solve this problem?’” shares Rowe. “If you were 15-years-old and were drawing fly eyes, you would probably start to draw individual little circles for every facet of that, and make those look really good, but then you'd get bored, and you would stop at some point. You'd have some of them but not all of them.”
Embracing the mindset of a teenager became a through-line for solving creative blocks during production.
“We also relied heavily on matte paintings,” Rowe states. “We're like ‘This is New York. So, are we going to have to model a lot of buildings and these really big complex sets that will lean heavily on geometry?’ Again, we looked at teenage drawings and, if I'm a teenager, and I'm sitting down to draw a city, I'm going to draw a couple of buildings really intensely and detailed, and then I'm going to get lazy and bored and start just doing lines and boxes and squiggles to imply more buildings in the background. Thankfully, the person in charge of matte paintings at Mikros, Arnaud Philippe-Giraux, is this very intense Frenchman who shoots art lasers out of his eyes. He was like, ‘I can matte paint all of this.’”
Some of the funniest examples of Rowe and his team’s referencing the mind of a teenage amateur cartoonist to create movie magic are Donnie’s beautifully crass one-liners, like “That head looks like Stewie had a baby with Hey Arnold!” or “I think his hormones just kicked in all at once.”
“My favorite Donnie line is one when they're debating if they have to help April and he's like, ‘Do we have to help her, though? It’s not like this is our fault,’” Rowe concluded. “Micah has such a sweet, young, innocent voice and anytime he voices anything kind of inhuman, it’s very funny.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
