After several failed live-action attempts, it seems as if Hollywood has finally realised that 6ft tall, nunchuck-wielding, roided-out reptilians shouldn’t ever exist outside of animation. Thank god. When the foam latex masks of the Nineties live-action films graduated into Michael Bay’s uncanny CGI creations of the 2010s, responses shifted from mild unease to full-blown horror. Tipping its hat to that inauspicious past, with a brief blast of Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap”, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem blends a hyper-aware but affectionate love of the franchise’s past with the look and lingo of the present. It’s learnt all the right lessons from the current Spider-Verse craze.
Director Jeff Rowe had already adopted the Spider-Verse “computer animation as hand-drawn concept art” ethos for his own The Mitchells vs the Machines in 2021. Here, he chucks in the raw, slightly misshapen quality of adolescent doodles – a sort of artful ugliness, that envisions New York City as one gigantic, blacklight-coloured laser quest venue. You imagine every floor is at least a little bit sticky. Mutant Mayhem, like The Mitchells vs the Machines or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish before it, suggests that studios are actually allowing animation filmmakers to do more than thoughtlessly hop on the latest trend. The film looks exactly how a franchise born out of the independent comic book scene and bolstered by Saturday morning cartoons should look.
