Here once again are the strangest ever comic-book heroes; they have featured in movies and TV shows for decades but are still so evergreen in their oddity that their wacky high-concept premise – mutant masked underground crime-fighting turtles with a love of pizza and the names of Renaissance artists – pretty much has to be explained all over again every time they are revived.
Well, this new animated origin story for the chelonian adventurers is unexpectedly funny, with a rather stylish crepuscular design. You’ve heard of the Spider-Verse; this is the Turtle-Verse, and it is directed by Jeff Rowe, who co-created The Mitchells vs the Machines, and co-written by Rowe, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, with Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit.
We go back 15 years to when a lonely, tormented scientist, Dr Stockman (voiced by Giancarlo Esposito) went rogue and created a bunch of bizarre mutant embryos in an underground lab. An attempt by his sinister corporate minders to bring him in ended in chaos; these four monsters wound up escaping but a greeny-glowing phial of the gooey gloop that supposedly creates the mutant-ness accidentally tumbled down the New York drain and infected four baby turtles being looked after down there by Splinter, a fugitive fighting rat (voiced by Jackie Chan) who schools them in martial arts.
They grew up to be Donatello (Micah Abbey), Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr), Raphael (Brady Noon) and Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), teen mutant turtles longing for adventures in the above-ground world. They take on Stockman’s now fully adult mutant monster Superfly (Ice Cube) with the reluctant support of high-schooler and wannabe journalist April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri). But all the time their overprotective quasi-dad Splinter warns them that humans may capture them and try to “milk” them, even though they have no nipples.
It’s a confrontation that leads to an X-Men style debate as to how much of a rapprochement there can ever be between humans and mutants. The turtles’ crime-fighting mission to save those very ungrateful humans who are so suspicious of them is amiable and enjoyable, although a quibble is that Rowe, Rogen et al skate around the refined humanist mystery of their names. These writers are clearly happier with pop culture gags about Chris Pine and so on – and there’s a lot of funny material – and do not want to venture into Kenneth Clark/Civilisation territory, however facetiously. A shame. Perhaps the sequel can take us to the Uffizi in Florence.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is released on 31 July in the UK, 2 August in the US and 7 September in Australia.
