Perhaps it’s the Spider-Verse effect, but mainstream animation for kids seems to be going through a period of rare visual creativity. The latest revamp of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, directed by Jeff Rowe, is a case in point. The story is a fairly generic origin tale-meets-mutant-apocalypse: the turtles are chafing against the overprotective love of their humanoid-rat father figure, Master Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan), but have yet to find a way to win the approval of the human world. The animation style, however, is gloriously anarchic: a scratchy, glitchy, scrawling onslaught that has more in common with the Biro’d graffiti on a high school bathroom door than it does with the immaculate 3D realism that has, until recently, been the norm for big-budget animation.
There’s a pleasing messiness to it all, a sense of barely controlled chaos that is matched by the jostling, overlapping voice performances. The nostalgic 80s and 90s hip-hop soundtrack is sublime, and while the action sequences can be hard to follow, there’s no faulting the film’s fizzing energy.
