Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhemis bringing the amphibian crime fighters back to the big screen thanks to Seth Rogen, in an all-new animated adventure that not only plays more on the “teenage” angle of the comic book characters than ever before, but does it ina rather unique animation style. Unlike the crisp, clean animation of Disney,Mutant Mayhemadopts a very rough and almost stop-motion like appearance.
The team behindMutant Mayhemhave grown up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and that is something that will hopefully shine through in the final movie. Along with Rogen, Jeff Rowe and Evan Goldberg are the creative force who have taken on a labor of love, while making the story relevant to today’s audiences and reinventing the four brothers in the process. Rowe recently explained the thought behind the unconventional animation style of the movie, which was partly inspired bySpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s ground-breaking visuals. He toldVariety:
“I think for us, artistically, it was a reaction to a 30-year trend in 3D CG animation to push towards photo realism and hyper-realistic lighting and texturing. 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.”
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Mutant Mayhem Could Spawn Its Own Universe
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been a part of pop culture from the moment they first appeared in print, being developed into cartoons, live-action movies, toy lines and more. While there is still a new live-action adaptation being considered, it seems that Paramount is planning on makingMutant Mayhemthe first building block of a new animated universe.
Seth Rogen is reportedly on board to produce a new TV seriesthat will act as a follow up to the movie, and of course if things go well with the big screen outing next month there could well be more movies to come. For now though, you can check out the latest trailer for the movie below, which is released on August 2.
