The New ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie Is Taking On A New Style of Animation

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrives in theaters this August, and it’s promising to be an animated action movie on a scale previously never seen before. 

When the first trailer dropped, the buzz on Twitter started immediately.

Jeff Rowe, the writer-director of Mutant Mayhem, confirmed that the film’s animation style is in large part inspired by the Spiderverse style, which has quickly become popular.

“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,” said Rowe. “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.”

There have been many iterations of everyone’s favorite ninja turtles since their original comic release in the 1980s, but Mutant Mayhem is gearing up to be one of the freshest takes on Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michaelangelo’s evil-fighting. 

Production designer Yashar Kassai said that although figuring out how to get the exact animation style right was difficult, “once everyone relinquished the conventional design wisdom of animation, we had a lot of fun.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrives in theaters on August 2nd.

Mia Macaluso: I am currently a graduate student studying journalism at Boston University. I received my undergraduate degree in communications/journalism at LSU in May 2022. My writing interests are the environment, art, culture, religion, and politics.
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